Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Conwell, Erin

doi:10.1177/0023830917737108

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This result persisted after controlling for factors including speaking rate, contextual predictability, and syntactic category (see Lohmann, 2018b, for a re-analysis and confirmation of this result). Similar patterns were found in a comparison of children and adults (Conwell, 2018) and in Mandarin (Sherr-Ziarko, 2015). The generalization also holds in homographic homophones, as demonstrated by Lohmann (2018a), who examined the durations of 63 homographic noun-verb pair homophones (e.g., "cut" (N) vs. "cut" (V)) in the Buckeye Corpus of spontaneous speech.…”

Section: Subphonemic Variation In Production Of Homophonessupporting

confidence: 77%

Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Martinuzzi

Schertz

2021

Lang Speech

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We examine the use of multiple subphonemic differences distinguishing homophones in production and perception, through a case study focusing on the distinction between two polysemous senses of the English word “sorry” (apology vs. attention-seeking). An analysis of production data from voice actors revealed significant and substantial durational differences between the two meanings. Tokens expressing an apology were longer than attention-seeking tokens, and the situational intensity of the context also independently affected duration. When asked to identify the meaning in a two-way forced-choice task after hearing each token spliced out of its context, listeners were above chance (64.7% accuracy) in identifying the intended meaning, and their responses were significantly correlated with the duration, intensity, and intonation contour (but not mean F0) of the productions. In a second perception task, listeners heard tokens of “sorry” that had been systematically manipulated to vary in duration, intensity, and intonation contour, with responses indicating that each of these dimensions played an independent role in listeners’ judgments. The results highlight the importance of broadening the scope of research on the use of subphonemic detail during lexical access and considering a wider range of lexical and non-lexical factors that condition variability on multiple acoustic dimensions, in order to work toward a more accurate picture of the systematic variability available in the input and tracked by listeners.

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Section: Subphonemic Variation In Production Of Homophonessupporting

confidence: 77%

Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Martinuzzi

Schertz

2021

Lang Speech

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“…Four examples of such variables are frequency, syntactic category, morphosyntactic number and morphological status. Forms of higher frequency, such as the English noun time, are typically produced with a shorter duration than forms of lower frequency, like the phonologically identical word thyme (see, e.g., Whalen 1991;Gahl 2008;Drager 2011;Conwell 2018;Lohmann 2018aLohmann , 2018b; but see also, for conflicting results, Jurafsky, Bell & Girand 2002;Cohn et al 2005). Moreover, Sereno & Jongman's (1995) data suggest that the syntactic category of an item affects the acoustics of this item; they detected variation between words like answer (verb) and the respective nominal equivalent (answer).…”

Section: Phonological Identity But Acoustic Variation: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Schlechtweg¹,

Corbett²

2022

English Language and Linguistics

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Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was longer if followed by a past tense verb (e.g. The pods/odds eventually dropped), in comparison to a following present tense verb (e.g. The old screens/jeans obviously need replacing.). Put differently, the s became longer in the absence of overt morphosyntactic agreement, where it was mostly the sole plurality marker in the sentence. The objective of the present article is to examine whether this effect can be replicated in a more controlled setting. Having considered a large number of potential confounding variables in a reading experiment, we found an effect in the expected direction, one that is compatible with the literature on the impact that predictability has on duration. We interpret this finding against the background of the role of fine acoustic detail in language.

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“…John likes fish ; John can fish ; Pinker, 1987) (see e.g. Conwell, 2018, for a review). But the problem only arises because researchers have assumed (in most cases presumably implicitly) a stored-abstraction, prototype-based model of word meaning, under which a word like bank, fish or table ‘should’ have a single meaning.…”

Section: Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

First Language

135

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The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings, (2) morphologically inflected words, (3) n-grams, (4) sentence-level constructions and (5) phonetics and phonology, accounts based on independently-represented abstractions (whether formal rules or prototype categories) fail for two reasons. First, it is not possible to posit abstractions that delineate possible and impossible form; e.g. that (1) rule in pool tables and data tables, but rule out chairs, (2) rule in the past-tense forms netted and bet but rule out * setted and * jet, (3) rule in the bigram f+t but rule out (probabilistically) v+t, (4) rule in both John feared Bill and John frightened Bill but rule out * John laughed Bill, (5) rule in Speaker A but rule out Speaker B as the person who produced a particular word (e.g. Sa’urday). Second, for each domain, empirical data provide evidence of exemplar storage that cannot be captured by putative abstractions: e.g. speakers prefer and/or show an advantage for (1) exemplar variation even within word-meaning ‘category boundaries’, (2) novel inflected forms that are similar to existing exemplars, (3) n-grams that have occurred frequently in the input, (4) SVO sentences with he as SUBJECT and it as OBJECT and (5) repeated productions of ‘the same’ word that are phonologically similar or, better still, identical. An exemplar account avoids an intractable lumping-or-splitting dilemma facing abstraction-based accounts and provides a unitary explanation of language acquisition across all domains; one that is consistent with models and empirical findings from the computational modelling and neuroimaging literature.

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Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Cited by 12 publications

References 42 publications

Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Sorry, Not Sorry: The independent role of multiple phonetic cues in signaling the difference between two word meanings

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

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