Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Abstract

Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was longer if followed by a past tense verb (e.g. The pods/odds eventually dropped), in comparison to a following present tense verb (e.g. The old screens/jeans obviously need replacing.). Put differently, the s became longer in the absence of overt morphosyntactic agreement, where it was mostly the sole plurality marker in the sentence. The objective of the present article is to examine whether this effect can be replicated in a more controlled setting. Having considered a large number of potential confounding variables in a reading experiment, we found an effect in the expected direction, one that is compatible with the literature on the impact that predictability has on duration. We interpret this finding against the background of the role of fine acoustic detail in language.

Morphosyntactic agreement in English: does it help the listener in noise?

“…Relying on the main effects analysis, we see that while determiner-noun agreement increased response accuracy, noun-verb agreement did not. This finding is in line with Schlechtweg & Corbett's (2023) findings for production. In this previous study, we found that the type of determiner affected the duration of the English plural s suffix.…”

“…Sentences similar to those in (4) have recently been examined in a production study (see Schlechtweg & Corbett 2023 and (2) above). The present work focuses on perception, relying on the eight sentence versions given in ( 4), that is, on both singular and plural nouns, while the production study from Schlechtweg & Corbett (2023) considered plural nouns only.…”

“…The objective of the present article is to rely on the four mentioned properties of English agreement to investigate whether agreement possibly serves a psycholinguistic function and is not just an unnecessary ingredient of English grammar (for discussion, see also Corbett 2006: 274). The focus only lies on the perspective of the listener in the experiment to be reported on in section 4, but the work connects to recent research on how English agreement affects the speaker side (see Schlechtweg & Corbett 2023). In this previous contribution, we analyzed whether the duration of the English s suffix was modulated by English agreement.…”

“…In Schlechtweg & Corbett (2023), these nouns were also used in similar but longer sentences. However, inSchlechtweg & Corbett (2023), there were sixteen sentences.3 The frequencies were checked on IntelliText(Hartley et al 2011), relying on the data from the UKWAC corpus.4 One might argue that conducting the experiment online has the disadvantage that participants use different types of headphones. I still relied on the online procedure for two reasons.…”