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Probabilistic reduction and probabilistic enhancement

Contextual and paradigmatic effects on morpheme pronunciation

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Abstract

Research on probabilistic pronunciation variation has generally focused on contextual probability, or the probability of using a linguistic unit (segment, syllable, word, etc.) in the context of a particular utterance. Overwhelmingly, this research has found that higher contextual probability leads to phonetic reduction. Less attention, however, has been given to paradigmatic probability, or the probability of using a particular linguistic form from a paradigm of related forms. The research that has addressed this type of probability has found inconsistent results: Sometimes higher paradigmatic probability leads to phonetic enhancement, and sometimes to phonetic reduction. In this paper I present the results of an experiment exploring the effects of both types of probability simultaneously on the pronunciation of agreement suffixes on English verbs. I find that (i) singular verb suffixes and stems are phonetically reduced when singular agreement is contextually probable; (ii) the nature of the reduction is modulated by verb frequency, consistent with dual-route models of lexical retrieval; and (iii) suffixes are phonetically enhanced when they are paradigmatically probable. I conclude by discussing how the patterns observed in this study shed light on the previous contradictory findings regarding the effects of paradigmatic probability on pronunciation.

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Notes

  1. The choice of completion was not taken into account during the subsequent acoustic analysis.

  2. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this issue to my attention.

  3. Although speaking rate was bounded, such that it could not have a negative value, it was nonetheless roughly normally distributed. Log-transforming it would have removed the boundedness problem, but introduced a skew in the distribution of the transformed rate, and thus the data were not transformed. This trade-off was not an issue for any of the other rates or duration measurements, because log-transforming their distributions did not result in non-normality.

  4. For example, the verb sobs has a singular/stem ratio of 5.1 in the SUBTLEX corpus, which, although not as high as gasps, is still dramatically greater than trips.

  5. Nakagawa and Schielzeth (2013) also propose a second statistic, conditional R2, which describes the amount of variation explained both by the fixed effects and the random effects. In this model, the conditional R2 is 0.503, indicating that roughly half the variation in the suffix duration can be explained by either the fixed effects or the random variation attributable to quirks of the individual speakers or verbs.

  6. The conditional R2 is 0.766, indicating that fixed and random effects together explain over three quarters of the variation in stem duration.

  7. See Lunden (2010, 2013) for a similar account of the importance of proportional duration as an explanation for final extrametricality effects.

  8. The median log frequency is 6.58, which, exponentiated, gives a frequency of 721 in the SUBTLEX corpus (Brysbaert et al. 2012). The corpus contains 51 million words, which means that the normalized median frequency is 721/51=14.14 words per million.

  9. Hay (2003) uses word frequency measurements from the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al. 1993), in which swiftly is more frequent than swift. According to data from the SUBTLEX corpus, however, both adverbs are less frequent than their bases, but it is nevertheless true that the relative frequency of swiftly to swift, 83/155=0.53, is higher than the relative frequency of softly to soft, 240/1631=0.15.

  10. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this distinction to my attention.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Susanne Gahl, Victor Kuperman, Haraald Baayen, and the audience members at the 2013 Morphology and its Interfaces conference for helpful discussion and comments on this research.

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  1. University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Clara Cohen

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Correspondence to Clara Cohen.

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This work was supported in part by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

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Cohen, C. Probabilistic reduction and probabilistic enhancement. Morphology 24, 291–323 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9243-y

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