The Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

Mulken

2019

Self Cite

An important dimension of linguistic variation is formality. This study investigates the role of social distance between interlocutors. Twenty-five native Dutch speakers retold eight short films to confederates, who acted either formally or informally. Speakers were familiarized with the informal confederates, whereas the formal confederates remained strangers. Results show that the two types of interlocutors elicited different versions of the same stories. Formal interlocutors (i.e. large social distance) elicited lower articulation rates, and more nouns and prepositions, both indicators of explicit information. Speakers addressing the informal interlocutors, to whom social distance was small, however, provided more explicit information with an involved character (i.e. adjectives with subjective meanings). They also used the word and more often as a gap filler or as a way to keep the floor. Furthermore, a small social distance elicited more laughter, interjections, first-person pronouns and direct speech, which are all indicators of involvement, empathy and subjectivity.

Section: Formal and Informal Speech Behaviorsupporting

confidence: 78%

The influence of social distance on speech behavior: Formality variation in casual speech

Köppen

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

Mulken

2019

Self Cite

“…It pleas for the use of one single corpus for the investigation of different phenomena in one language, and for the use of corpora collected with the same procedure for the comparison of languages (e.g. the Nijmegen corpora of casual French, Spanish and Czech, which were all collected with the procedure described in Torreira, Adda-Decker & Ernestus, 2010). At the same time, however, we should investigate reduction phenomena with as many different corpora as possible, because they all have their strengths and weaknesses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

Hanique

Verboom

2015

Journal of Phonetics

Self Cite

This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme coarticulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension.

“…These are absent in careful speech and are typically avoided as much as possible in casual speech produced in formal situations (e.g., Torreira et al, 2010). Further, sentence structure tends to be more complex in careful speech than in casual speech (e.g., Biber 1988; Biber et al 1998).…”

Section: Differences At the Syntactic Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why we need to investigate casual speech to truly understand language production, processing and the mental lexicon

Tucker

2016

Self Cite

The majority of studies addressing psycholinguistic questions focus on speech produced and processed in a careful, laboratory speech style. This ‘careful’ speech is very different from the speech that listeners encounter in casual conversations. This article argues that research on casual speech is necessary to show the validity of conclusions based on careful speech. Moreover, research on casual speech produces new insights and questions on the processes underlying communication and on the mental lexicon that cannot be revealed by research using careful speech. This article first places research on casual speech in its historic perspective. It then provides many examples of how casual speech differs from careful speech and shows that these differences may have important implications for psycholinguistic theories. Subsequently, the article discusses the challenges that research on casual speech faces, which stem from the high variability of this speech style, its necessary casual context, and that casual speech is connected speech. We also present opportunities for research on casual speech, mostly in the form of new experimental methods that facilitate research on connected speech. However, real progress can only be made if these new methods are combined with advanced (still to be developed) statistical techniques.