Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages

Abstract

SignificanceWhen we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production. Here, we study naturalistic speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world. We show a robust tendency for slower speech before nouns as compared with verbs. Even though verbs may be more complex than nouns, nouns thus appear to require more planning, probably due to the new information they usually represent. This finding points to strong universals in how humans process language and manage referential information when communicating linguistically.

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

“…A recent line of research has proposed that redundant marking of features such as gender may ease language processing effort. Among word classes and across languages, the part of speech associated with most difficulty is nouns [122]. Since language processing effort is associated with predictability [103,104], an element that makes nouns more predictable in context would make them easier to produce and comprehend.…”

How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech

“…In other words, because verbs take arguments, there ought to be less variance in their patterns of covariation and this ought to lead to less overall uncertainty in the context of verb arguments. Consistent with this, Seifart et al [ 15 ] report that slower articulations and more disfluencies precede nouns than verbs across languages, raising further questions about the kind of information that is communicated by variational patterns in speech and, in particular, whether and to what degree, this kind of sublexical variance actually serves a communicative function.…”

Headedness and the Lexicon: The Case of Verb-to-Noun Ratios

“…Thus, on the whole, verbs are semantically more informative than nouns. Next, an overt finite verb is necessary to form a clause; pro-verbs are extremely rare, whereas pronouns, including silent ones, are extremely common across languages (Seifart et al 2018 for similar observations). Accordingly, verbs are both informative and structurally necessary because of their connection to the inflectional head of a clause.…”

“…It is often stated that nouns are easier to process than verbs (Vigliocco et al 2011;Szekely et al 2005). However, in a recent paper, Seifart et al (2018) show that in eight languages out of nine in their sample, pauses are longer before nouns than before verbs, which they interpret as a sign of additional processing to find definitions that would satisfy everyone, but in working toward that goal, we have tried to stay as theory neutral and inclusive as possible.…”