Intelligibility Versus Redundancy - Conditions of Dependency

Abstract

The relationship between context redundancy and key-word intelligibility was examined in sentences having both high and low redundancy. The study partially replicates work by Philip Lieberman (1963) in which he concluded that the degree of stress and carefulness of articulation of a word varies inversely with its redundancy. More words and more extreme redundancies in word pairs were used in the current study. These word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. With the text-type sentence pairs, there was an intelligibility advantage for the words in lower-redundancy contexts. For the adage and spoken-sentence pairs, there was no intelligibility advantage for words in either context. It is suggested that the adage is not a good representative of high-redundancy contexts. The result that intelligibility and redundancy are inversely related in some instances (text-type sentences) indicates that information control by a speaker is going on even while reading test sentences. That is, utterance planning for the speech-production mechanism involves interpreting semantic information which may be expressed in fine adjustments in motor control.

The recognition of words after their acoustic offsets in spontaneous speech: Effects of subsequent context

“…The revised cohort model currently depends on these two sources of information. And it is well established that when left context offers more constraint, whether syntactic, semantic, or discoursal, then a poorer acoustic specification is sufficient for recognition (Hunnicutt, 1985;Lieberman, 1963;Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978). The present suggestion is that the consequences of this complementary relationship include the possibility that no word hypothesis will be selected for integration by word offset, because there are some values of the context/clarity function at which selection is impossible.…”

Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch

“…The probability of occurrence of a word also depends on neighbouring words. In recent years, numerous studies have addressed the relationship between predictability from neighbouring words and acoustic reduction (e.g., Hunnicutt, 1985;FoslerLussier & Morgan, 1999;Gregory et al, 1999;Bush, 2001;Jurafsky et al, 2001;Bell, Jurafsky, Fosler-Lussier, Girand, Gregory, & Gildea, 2003). To determine the predictability of their target words, most authors have used measures like conditional probability or mutual information, which are computed using frequency estimates from large speech corpora.…”

Acoustic Vowel Reduction in Creek: Effects of Distinctive Length and Position in the Word

“…Positional reduction is plausibly a universal phonetic tendency arising from a combination of reduced speaking effort [Lindblom, 1990], the predictability of lateoccurring elements in the speech stream [Lieberman, 1963;Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980;Shipman and Zue, 1982;Hunnicut, 1985], and the need for a way to encode prosodic structure regardless of the gestural content at the margins of prosodic units. And although our use of the term 'positional' in 'positional reduction' is more restrictive than the common meaning of this term in the phonological literature on 'positional neutralization' [see Steriade, 1995] -we are here only concerned with positions defined in terms of the sequential ordering of syllables in a word rather than positions defined by stress or morphological categories -it is interesting nonetheless that there are cases of phonological vowel neutralization or failure of contrast which seem to be conditioned by the sequential position of the vowel.…”