Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

Abstract

It is known that acoustic variation is influenced by the predictability of words and the information that they represent. What is unknown is whether acoustic reduction is also influenced by the referential predictability of thematic roles. We tested this question in two production experiments, where speakers heard a sentence with goal/source arguments, e.g., "Lady Mannerly [source] gave a painting to Sir Barnes [goal]," and described a picture of a subsequent action, e.g., "Sir Barnes threw it in the closet." We analyzed the duration of full NP descriptions used to refer to the pictured character. We found that duration was shorter for references to the goal than the source, but only in Experiment 2, where the timing of the stimuli encouraged the participant to plan their response incrementally, and not Experiment 1, where participants could pre-plan their responses. The strongest finding across both experiments was that response latency predicted duration, and latency was influenced by the predictability of thematic roles: Goal continuations had significantly shorter latencies. Together, these findings suggest that thematic role predictability does affect acoustic duration, and may be related to the time needed for utterance planning.

Prosody indexes both competence and performance

“…Other work suggests that the semantic relatedness of words produced in succession might even impact production fluency, though the exact mechanisms are still debated (Balota, Boland, & Shields, ; Fink, Oppenheim, & Goldrick, ). Existing accounts that link aspects of speech timing to production ease (Arnold, ; Arnold, Kahn, & Pancani, ; Zerkle, Rosa, & Arnold, ) are also consistent with our perspective.…”

Does pre-planning explain why predictability affects reference production?

“…In the experiments fromZerkle, Rosa & Arnold (2015), the stimulus picture did not appear until after the context sentence, so the duration of the context sentence is not as relevant. SeeZerkle, Rosa, & Arnold (2017) for a discussion of differences in planning across these two studies.…”

Dutch speakers take referent predictability into account, irrespective of addressee presence

“…That is, predictable referents may be easier to retrieve from memory, which in turn results in shorter forms to refer to predictable referents. So far, empirical studies have only shown production facilitation effects of predictable referents at the acoustic level (e.g., duration; Arnold et al, 2012;Zerkle et al, 2017), but not on the selection of a particular form of expression Zerkle & Arnold, 2016). Recently, however, Karimi (2022) has argued that a more accurate measure for predictability as a factor in speaker effort may be referential entropy, which takes into account the probability distribution over all potential referents in the context instead of just the likelihood of mentioning the target referent (see also Modi et al, 2017;Pickering & Gambi, 2018;Tily & Piantadosi, 2009).…”