Presentation: Hsiang-Yu
Summary: Sheng-Fu
In everyday speech, words
are often pronounced with a shorter duration than they are in citation forms.
Such reductions have been linked to word frequency. Since words with different
frequencies often also differ in length, some studies have focused on the
effect of word frequency on phonemes or words matched on length in letters.
However, for these studies, factors such as the morphological complexity of the
words in interest are still not controlled. The present study examines the
effects of word frequency on Dutch affixes. Materials were words containing
affixes ge-, ver-, ont-, and -ljkl, taken from the Corpus of Spoken
Dutch. Two probabilistic factors were included, namely word frequency and morphological
complexity (word-stem ratio). Non-probabilistic factors included speech rate
(syllable per second), sex, age, and word position (in the carrier utterance).
Results of a series of least squares regression provide strong evidence for the
relationship between acoustic reduction and lexical frequency: higher word
frequency led to shorter duration of not only the affixes as whole, but also
the individual segments. Other significant predictors for acoustic reduction
include the presence of disfluency following the target word and a higher
speech rate. On the other hand, lower morphological complexity (i.e., a higher
word-stem ratio) caused a longer segmental duration because the affixes of
morphologically less complex words are more likely to receive stress. Overall,
the results showed that models of speech production should incorporate word
frequency as a factor affecting the acoustic realization of lower-level units
such as individual speech segments in affixes.
