Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms

Abstract

Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words cannot co-determine the phonetic realization of these inflected words. This study shows that the stem vowels of regular English inflected verb forms that are more frequent in their paradigm are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging compositional models of lexical processing. The effect of paradigmatic probability dovetails well with the Paradigmatic Enhancement Hypothesis and is consistent with a growing body of research indicating that the whole is more than its parts.

Paradigmatic Relations Interact During the Production of Complex Words: Evidence From Variable Plurals in Dutch

“…As such, this account does not provide clear explanations of paradigmatic enhancement effects on forms that can be predicted from the communicative context (e.g., Kuperman et al, 2007;Schuppler et al, 2012). Our research does provide naturalistic support for previous experimental findings of paradigmatic enhancement in which the linguistic context was controlled to allow for multiple paradigm members (e.g., Cohen, 2014Cohen, , 2015Bell et al, 2020;Tomaschek et al, 2021b).…”

“…According to this account, then, paradigmatic enhancement reflects a relative lack of reduction due to the relative infrequency of coactivated word forms. While direct phonetic influence of the coactivated variants on pronunciation works for this example and the phenomena described by Cohen (2014) and Cohen (2015), it does not explain other manifestations of paradigmatic enhancement (e.g., Tomaschek et al, 2021b). It may also be that coactivation of paradigmatic alternatives indirectly disrupts articulation of the target form.…”

“…For instance, Cohen (2014) found that when speakers read aloud sentences like The choir for the church services seems nervous, the verb agreement suffix -s was longer if the 3rd person singular form (e.g., seems) was frequent compared to the uninflected form (e.g., seem). Various studies have found similar phonetic enhancement of complex words with a higher frequency relative to one or more members of their paradigm (Kuperman et al, 2007;Schuppler et al, 2012;Bell et al, 2020;Tomaschek et al, 2021b, but see Hanique and Ernestus, 2012). This so-called paradigmatic enhancement effect has been argued to occur when the choice between multiple paradigm members is probabilistic (Kuperman et al, 2007).…”

New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion

“…represented by fewer tokens, many of those categories are also severely limited in lexical types, making it difficult to estimate a within-category lexical frequency effect. Moreover, the fact that morphology and frequency interact at all draws our attention to the possibility that morphologically informed frequency measures (such as lemma frequency or suffix frequency; see, e.g., Tomaschek, Tucker, Ramscar, & Baayen, 2021) could be relevant in addition to, or instead of, whole word frequency.…”

Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability

“…These effects are mirrored in articulation. Repetitions and frequency are correlated with higher articulatory velocity, smoother gestural transitions and stronger anticipatory coarticulation, which are in turn mirrored by shorter execution times (Tiede et al, 2011; Tomaschek, Arnold, et al, 2018; Tomaschek, Tucker, Baayen, et al, 2018; Tomaschek, Tucker, Ramscar, et al, submitted; Tomaschek, Tucker, Wieling, et al, 2014; Tomaschek, Wieling, et al, 2013). Unsurprisingly, given the foregoing, the temporal coordination of gestural sequences is modulated by lifelong practice (Cychosz, 2020; Green et al, 2002; Noiray et al, 2013; Rubertus & Noiray, 2018, 2020; Tomaschek, Tucker, et al, 2018).…”