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Frequent or contextually predictable words are often phonetically reduced, i.e. shortened and produced with articulatory undershoot. Explanations for phonetic reduction of predictable forms tend to take one of two approaches: Intelligibility-based accounts hold that talkers maximize intelligibility of words that might otherwise be difficult to recognize; productionbased accounts hold that variation reflects the speed of lexical access and retrieval in the language production system. Here we examine phonetic variation as a function of phonological neighborhood density, capitalizing on the fact that words from dense phonological neighborhoods tend to be relatively difficult to recognize, yet easy to produce.We show that words with many phonological neighbors tend to be phonetically reduced (shortened in duration and produced with more centralized vowels) in connected speech, when other predictors of phonetic variation are brought under statistical control. We argue that our findings are consistent with the predictions of production-based accounts of pronunciation variation.

Frequent words tend to shorten (see e.g. Schuchardt 1885, Hooper 1976), as do words that have a high probability of occurrence given a neighboring word (Jurafsky et al. 2001). This tendency has been cited in support of the claim that probabilities are an inherent part of grammar, and of syntax in particular. There is widespread consensus, however, that the syntax of natural languages cannot be captured in terms of item-to-item transitions (Chomsky 1957). Therefore, unless one considers probabilities of syntactic structures, rather than particular combinations of neighboring words, pronunciation variation cannot be said to reflect probabilistic effects in syntax. In this article, we report a case of pronunciation variation that reflects contextual probabilities of syntactic structures. The relevant probabilities are based on the probability of a given syntactic structure, given a particular verb. We showthat these probabilities affect American English /t,d/- deletion, as well as the durations of words and phrases. Our results are consistent with the notion that knowledge of grammar includes knowledge of probabilities of syntactic structures, and that this knowledge affects language production.

Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and coding criteria. This article provides norming data for 281 verbs of interest to psycholinguistic research, sampled from a corpus of American English, along with a detailed coding manual. We examine the effect on transitivity bias of various coding decisions and methods of computing verb biases.

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Frequent words tend to shorten. But do homophone pairs, such as time and thyme , shorten equally if one member of the pair is frequent? This study reports an analysis of roughly 90,000 tokens of homophones in the Switchboard corpus of American English telephone conversations, in which it was found that high-frequency words like time are significantly shorter than their low-frequency homophones like thyme . The effect of lemma frequency persisted when local speaking rate, predictability from neighboring words, position relative to pauses, syntactic category, and orthographic regularity were brought under statistical control. These findings have theoretical implications for the locus of frequency information in linguistic competence and in models of language production, and for the role of articulatory routinization in shortening.

Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction overwhelmingly more probable, marginally more probable, or no more probable than another. Here, we present evidence that acoustic features of spontaneous speech reflect these probabilities: when speakers choose a less probable construction, they are more likely to be disfluent, and their fluent words are likely to have a relatively longer duration. Conversely, words in more probable constructions are shorter and spoken more fluently. Our findings suggest that the di¤ering probabilities of a syntactic construction in context are not epiphenomenal, but reflect a part of a speakers' knowledge of their language.

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