Search

In mainstream phonology, contrastive properties, like stem-final voicing, are simply listed in the lexicon. This article reviews experimental evidence that such contrastive properties may be predictable to some degree and that the relevant statistically gradient generalizations form an inherent part of the grammar. The evidence comes from the underlying voice specification of stem-final obstruents in Dutch. Contrary to received wisdom, this voice specification is partly predictable from the obstruent's manner and place of articulation and from the phonological properties of the preceding segments. The degree of predictability, which depends on the exact contents of the lexicon, directs speakers' guesses of underlying voice specifications. Moreover, existing words that disobey the generalizations are disadvantaged by being recognized and produced more slowly and less accurately, also under natural conditions. We discuss how these observations can be accounted for in two types of different approaches to grammar, Stochastic Optimality Theory and exemplar-based modeling.

In everyday speech, words may be reduced. Little is known about the consequences of such reductions for spoken word comprehension. This study investigated /t/-lenition in Dutch in two corpus studies and three perceptual experiments. The production studies revealed that /t/-lenition is most likely to occur after [s] and before bilabial consonants. The perception experiments showed that listeners take into account both phonological context, phonetic detail, and the lexical status of the form in the interpretation of codas that may or may not contain a lenited word-final /t/. These results speak against models of word recognition that make hard decisions on a prelexical level.

This auditory lexical decision study shows that cohort entropies, conditional root uniqueness points, and morphological family size all contribute to the dynamics of the auditory comprehension of prefixed words. Three entropy measures calculated for different positions in the stem of Dutch prefixed words revealed facilitation for higher entropies, except at the point of disambiguation, where we observed inhibition. Morphological family size was also facilitatory, but only for prefixed words in which the conditional root uniqueness point coincided with the conventional uniqueness point. For words with early conditional disambiguation, in contrast, only the morphologically related words that were onset-aligned with the target word facilitated lexical decision.

In Dutch, high-frequency words with the suffix -lijk are often highly reduced in spontaneous unscripted speech. This study addressed socio-geographic variation in the reduction of such words against the backdrop of the variation in their use in written and spoken Dutch. Multivariate analyses of the frequencies with which the words were used in a factorially contrasted set of subcorpora revealed significant variation involving the speaker’s country, sex, and education level for spoken Dutch, and involving country and register for written Dutch. Acoustic analyses revealed that Dutch men reduced most often, while Flemish highly educated women reduced least. Two linguistic context effects emerged, one prosodic, and the other pertaining to the flow of information. Words in sentence final position showed less reduction, while words that were better predictable from the preceding word in the sentence (based on mutual information) tended to be reduced more often. The increased probability of reduction for forms that are more predictable in context, combined with the loss of the suffix in the more extremely reduced forms, suggests that high-frequency words in -lijk are undergoing a process of erosion that causes them to gravitate towards monomorphemic function words.

This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictabil-ityfrom neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the sevenmost frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were ran-domlyselected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis ofthe selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measuredby duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, pre-dictabilityfrom the previous word and predictability from the following word.Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and tar-getwords. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictabil-ityfrom the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven targetwords. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all targetwords equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models ofspeech production are discussed.

Previous work has shown that Dutch listeners use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimise morphological processing: Listeners are sensitive to prosodic differences between a noun stem realised in isolation and a noun stem realised as part of a plural form (in which the stem is followed by an unstressed syllable). The present study, employing a lexical decision task, provides an additional demonstration of listeners' sensitivity to prosodic cues in the stem. This sensitivity is shown for two languages that differ in morphological productivity: Dutch and English. The degree of morphological productivity does not correlate with listeners' sensitivity to prosodic cues in the stem, but it is reflected in differential sensitivities to the word-specific log odds ratio of encountering an unshortened stem (i.e., a stem in isolation) versus encountering a shortened stem (i.e., a stem followed by a suffix consisting of one or more unstressed syllables). In addition to being sensitive to the prosodic cues themselves, listeners are also sensitive to the probabilities of occurrence of these prosodic cues.

This study addresses the question to what extent the production of regular past tense forms in Dutch is affected by analogical processes. We report an experiment in which native speakers of Dutch listened to existing regular verbs over headphones, and had to indicate which of the past tense allomorphs, te or de, was appropriate for these verbs. According to generative analyses, the choice between the two suffixes is completely regular and governed by the underlying [voice]-specification of the stem-final segment. In this approach, no analogical effects are expected. In connectionist and analogical approaches, by contrast, the phonological similarity structure in the lexicon is expected to affect lexical processing. Our experimental results support the latter approach: all participants created more nonstandard past tense forms, produced more inconsistency errors, and responded more slowly for verbs with stronger analogical support for the nonstandard form.

Contains fulltext : 64257.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical representations in the mental lexicon, and that these latter representations induce reconstruction processes. Listeners restore suffixes that are partly or completely missing in reduced word forms. A series of phoneme-monitoring experiments reveals the nature of this restoration: the basis for suffix restoration is mainly phonological in nature, but orthography has an influence as well.

This paper discusses some pitfalls in corpus research and suggests solutions on the basis of examples and computer simulations. We first address reliability problems in language transcriptions, agreement between transcribers, and how disagreements can be dealt with. We then show that the frequencies of occurrence obtained from a corpus cannot always be analyzed with the traditional χ2 test, as corpus data are often not sequentially independent and unit independent. Next, we stress the relevance of the power of statistical tests, and the sizes of statistically significant effects. Finally, we point out that a t-test based on log odds often provides a better alternative to a χ2 analysis based on frequency counts.

Previous research has shown that the production of morphologically complex words in isolation is affected by the properties of morphologically, phonologically, or semantically similar words stored in the mental lexicon. We report five experiments with Dutch speakers that show that reading an inflectional word form in its linguistic context is also affected by analogical sets of formally similar words. Using the self-paced reading technique, we show in Experiments 1–3 that an incorrectly spelled suffix delays readers less if the incorrect spelling is in line with the spelling of verbal suffixes in other inflectional forms of the same verb. In Experiments 4 and 5, our use of the self-paced reading technique shows that formally similar words with different stems affect the reading of incorrect suffixal allomorphs on a given stem. These intra- and interparadigmatic effects in reading may be due to online processes or to the storage of incorrect forms resulting from analogical effects in production. We thank Harald Baayen, Dominiek Sandra, and Rob Schreuder for their comments on earlier versions of this article. Correspondence relating to this article may be sent to M. Ernestus, Max Planck Institute for

Normal, spontaneous speech utilizes many reduced forms. Consonants in spontaneous speech frequently have a different manner or voicing than would be expected in clear speech (e.g. /d/ and /ŋ/ in “you doing” both being realized as glides or /dȝ/ in “just” as a fricative), and near or complete deletions are also common (e.g. the flap in “a little”). Thus, listeners encounter and must process such pronunciations frequently. When speakers and listeners do not share the same dialect or native language, such reductions may hinder processing more than for native listeners of the same dialect. The current work reports a lexical decision experiment comparing listeners’ processing of reduced vs. careful stops (e.g. /g/ in”baggy” pronounced as an approximant or as a stop), by several groups of listeners. Results show that listeners from both Arizona and Alberta, Canada can recognize speech by an Arizona speaker with reduced stops, but they recognize the words more easily when stops are clearly articulated. Speech st...

Reduction in casual speech can create ambiguity, e.g., “he was” can sound like “he’s.” Before quotative “like” (“so she’s/she was like…”), it was found that there is little accurate acoustic information about the distinction in the signal. This work examines what types of information (acoustics of the target itself, speech rate, coarticulation, and syntax/semantics) listeners use to recognize such reduced function words. We compare perception studies presenting the targets auditorily with varying amounts of context, presenting the context without the targets, and a visual study presenting context in written form. Given primarily discourse information (visual or auditory context only), subjects are strongly biased toward past, reflecting the use of quotative “like” for reporting past speech. However, if the target itself is presented, the direction of bias reverses, indicating that listeners favor acoustic information within the target (which is reduced, sounding like the shorter, present form) over almost...

Older adults have more language experience than young adults and may therefore rely more strongly on transitional probabilities between words for spoken word recognition. We investigated recognition of acoustically reduced words (such as “promised”) that were followed by a word with which it either formed a fixed expression (“promised land”) or not (“promised lamp”). Our research questions were (a) whether older adults show a greater following‐word context effect on target word recognition than young adults; (b) whether low‐pass filtering the stimuli would bring about a stronger reliance on following context in young adults; and (c) whether there are any interactions with the morphological complexity of the target word (e.g., “promised” versus “fat”), because complex and longer words can be more reduced. Data analysis (recognition accuracy and RTs) showed that words were better recognized when part of a fixed expression, and that older adults benefited more in RT than young adults (equal benefit in accura...

Spontaneous conversations are characterized by reduced pronunciation variants that, relative to the corresponding citation variants, provide less acoustic information (e.g., the English word “hilarious” may be pronounced like [hlErEs]). This paper discusses three series of experiments investigating how listeners process reduced variants within their natural contexts. In two series of experiments, native speakers of Northern Dutch listened to extracts from spontaneous conversations in Northern Dutch and either predicted masked reduced words or repeated stretches of speech. These experiments show that even though reduced variants contain little acoustic information, listeners heavily rely on this information. Furthermore, listeners use acoustic cues in the context, which is often reduced itself, and these cues may override semantic/syntactic cues. In the third series of experiments, native speakers of Northern and Southern Dutch listened to conversations in Northern Dutch and indicated whether words appearing on the screen had just occurred in the conversation. The results show that acoustic cues are less informative for listeners who are less familiar with the language variant. These listeners rely more on semantic/syntactic information. In conclusion, acoustic cues, even if highly reduced, play a major role in the processing of conversational speech, especially in native listeners.

Spontaneous, reduced pronunciations diverge greatly from citation forms. The quality of a single segment can change, e.g., /b/ in “about” surfacing as an approximant. But sounds, syllables, and entire words can also be deleted (e.g., “do you have time?” as [djutEm] with no acoustic trace of “have”). This work investigates the perception of reduced function words such as “he was” or “we were.” Twenty‐two young American English speakers’ spontaneous conversations with close acquaintances were recorded. From these, we selected utterances containing items such as “he’s/he was, we’re/we were, got him/got them.” When hearing an entire utterance, native listeners may clearly perceive “we were,” but on hearing just the “we were” portion, they perceive an unambiguous “we’re.” The portion of the signal presented to listeners is manipulated to determine the contributions of local acoustic cues, speech rate and coarticulation, semantic and syntactic information, and overall bias toward present vs past tense. An audit...

Words with higher token frequencies tend to have more reduced acoustic realizations than lower frequency words (e.g., Hay, 2000; Bybee, 2001; Jurafsky et al., 2001). This study documents frequency effects for regressive voice assimilation (obstruents are voiced before voiced plosives) in Dutch morphologically complex words in the subcorpus of read‐aloud novels in the corpus of spoken Dutch (Oostdijk et al., 2002). As expected, the initial obstruent of the cluster tends to be absent more often as lexical frequency increases. More importantly, as frequency increases, the duration of vocal‐fold vibration in the cluster decreases, and the duration of the bursts in the cluster increases, after partialing out cluster duration. This suggests that there is less voicing for higher‐frequency words. In fact, phonetic transcriptions show regressive voice assimilation for only half of the words and progressive voice assimilation for one third. Interestingly, the progressive voice assimilation observed for higher‐frequency complex words renders these complex words more similar to monomorphemic words: Dutch monomorphemic words typically contain voiceless obstruent clusters (Zonneveld, 1983). Such high‐frequency complex words may therefore be less easily parsed into their constituent morphemes (cf. Hay, 2000), favoring whole word lexical access (Bertram et al., 2000).

Although the consonant inventories of Dutch, German, English, and Spanish are similar in size, the fricative inventories differ: English and Spanish distinguish labio‐dental versus dental fricatives, whereas Dutch and German do not. Three phoneme‐monitoring experiments investigated whether the relevance of formant transitions varies across languages, and whether it depends on the types of fricatives in a language. Native Dutch, German, English, and Spanish listeners detected a target fricative, /s/ or /f/, in nonwords. Half of the nonwords were cross spliced to produce misleading formant transitions: an /s/ replaced an /f/, or vice versa. Dutch and German listeners were unaffected by the misleading formant transitions, whereas Spanish listeners missed significantly more fricatives surrounded by misleading formant transitions; these results were obtained whether stimuli were originally spoken by a Dutch or Spanish speaker. English listeners showed the same sensitivity to formant transitions as the Spanish. Despite previous reports that formant transition cues are of negligible significance for fricative identification (Klaassen‐Don, 1983), the present findings show that formant transitions are indeed relevant for listeners whose native language distinguishes labio‐dental versus dental fricatives. Listeners relied on the transitions even though no dental fricatives occurred in these stimuli, and independently of the speaker’s native language.

Previous research suggests that bilinguals presented with low and high predictability sentences benefit from semantics in clear but not in conversational speech [1]. In everyday speech, however, many words are not highly predictable. Previous research has shown that native listeners can use also more subtle semantic contextual information [2]. The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments investigating to what extent late Asian-English bilinguals benefit from subtle semantic cues in their processing of English unreduced and reduced speech. Our results indicate that these bilinguals are less sensitive to semantic cues than native listeners for both speech registers. Index Terms: acoustic reduction, word recognition, speech perception, semantics, latent semantic analysis, English, Asian, bilinguals