Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch

Abstract

Running title: Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction ABSTRACTThis study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morphologically complex words in spoken Dutch. The hypothesis that high-frequency words are more reduced than low-frequency words was tested by comparing the durations of affixes occurring in different carrier words. Four Dutch affixes were investigated, each occurring in a large number of words with different frequencies. The materials came from a large database of face-to-face conversations. For each word containing a target affix, one token was randomly selected for acoustic analysis. Measurements were made of the duration of the affix as a whole and the durations of the individual segments in the affix. For three of the four affixes, a higher frequency of the carrier word led to shorter realizations of the affix as a whole, individual segments in the affix, or both. Other relevant factors were the sex and age of the speaker, segmental context, and speech rate. To accommodate for these findings, models of speech production should allow word frequency to affect the acoustic realizations of lower-level units, such as individual speech sounds occurring in affixes.

Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

“…This is in-line with findings for adult-directed speech, where it has been demonstrated that words tend to be more reduced the more predictable they are, given their frequency of occurrence but also given the context (e.g. Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand and Jurafsky, 2009;Pluymaekers, Ernestus and Baayen, 2005 Several studies suggest that reduction in infant-directed speech is conditioned by the same factors as reduction in adult-directed speech. Pate and Goldwater (2011) also report predictability effects on word duration in American English infant-directed speech to 9-and 10-month-olds.…”

“…This is in-line with findings for adult-directed speech, where it has been demonstrated that words tend to be more reduced the more predictable they are, given their frequency of occurrence but also given the context (e.g. Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand and Jurafsky, 2009;Pluymaekers, Ernestus and Baayen, 2005). Bard and Anderson's studies do not provide information about what acoustic properties caused these words to be less identifiable, and how and to what degree these words were reduced.…”

“…This was also true for our materials. Following Pluymaekers et al (2005), we defined speech rate as the number of syllables per second in the utterance containing the token. The number of syllables was defined as the number of vowels in the phonetic transcription of the target word (see below) plus the number of vowels in the full pronunciations of the other words in the utterance.…”

Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch

“…Second, when speakers reduce words, they can do so in many different ways. For instance, the Dutch suffix -lijk can be realized at a continuum ranging from the citation form [lək] to highly reduced [ə] or [k] (Pluymaekers, Ernestus, & Baayen, 2005). As speakers can choose from a great variety of possible reductions of a given sequence, they vary in the choices they make (Ernestus et al, 2002).…”

“…Pluymaekers et al (2005) examined reduced affixes in spoken Dutch, amongst which the prefix ver-. They first established how many different word types starting with ver-occurred in the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (Oostdijk, 2000).…”