Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

Abstract

Many phonological processes can be affected by segmental context spanning word boundaries, which often lead to variable outcomes. This paper tests the idea that some of this variability can be explained by reference to production planning. We examine coronal stop deletion (CSD), a variable process conditioned by preceding and upcoming phonological context, in a corpus of spontaneous British English speech, as a means of investigating a number of variables associated with planning: Prosodic boundary strength, word frequency, conditional probability of the following word, and speech rate. From the perspective of production planning, (1) prosodic boundaries should affect deletion rate independently of following context; (2) given the locality of production planning, the effect of the following context should decrease at stronger prosodic boundaries; and (3) other factors affecting planning scope should modulate the effect of upcoming phonological material above and beyond the modulating effect of prosodic boundaries. We build a statistical model of CSD realization, using pause length as a quantitative proxy for boundary strength, and find support for these predictions. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that the locality of production planning constrains variability in speech production, and have practical implications for work on CSD and other variable processes.

Speech production planning affects phonological variability: a case study in French liaison

“…Given that lexical frequency has a facilitatory effect on word form retrieval (Oldfield & Wingfield, 1965;Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), the W2 frequency effect is consistent with the PPH predcition that liaison should be more likely when W2 is easier to plan. Again, this prediction extends to all external sandhi processes in which the the triggering environment is found across a following word boundary, and there is supporting evidence for this pattern from previous studies on English coronal stop realizations (Tanner et al, 2015;Kilbourn-Ceron et al, 2016). The finding of a parallel effect of lexical frequency for both general reductive processes like coronal stop deletion and flapping in English, and for a non-reductive process like liaison in French is, we argue, uniquely predicted by the PPH.…”

“…The Locality of Production Planning Hypothesis (PPH) (Wagner, 2012;Tanner et al, 2015;Kilbourn-Ceron et al, 2016) proposes that the constraints of online speech production planning play a role in explaining external sandhi patterns. The core idea is that the choice of pronunciation for a word cannot be affected by the following phonological context if that context is not available at the time the word is being encoded.…”

Perturbing the community grammar: Individual differences and community-level constraints on sociolinguistic variation

“…A complication to this is that external factors can interfere with a speaker's planning, diminishing the size of planning/production units or even preventing a speaker from planning ahead at all while producing. Factors that have been attested to interfere with planning include a speaker's cognitive load; the frequency, predictability, and neighborhood density of the words to be planned; and the structural complexity of the utterance to be produced (Wagner et al 2010 and further studies reviewed in Tanner et al 2017 andFink &Goldrick 2015). As a result, two words that end up being produced adjacent to one another in the speech stream may not in fact have been planned together.…”

“…There is still considerable debate over the size of planning units in the simplest case; that is, over the question of how much linguistic material a speaker can plan at once when disruptive factors like cognitive load and structural complexity are not at issue (see Tanner et al 2017 for a recent review of work in this area). In fact, the scope of speech planning appears to be subject to individual differences.…”

“…Further examples of how planning disruption can shape the production of sociolinguistic variation can be seen in work by Wagner (2011) and Tanner et al (2017). In both studies, researchers examine the potential for disrupted advance planning to modulate a following context constraint on a sociolinguistic variable.…”