Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech

Abstract

Frequent or contextually predictable words are often phonetically reduced, i.e. shortened and produced with articulatory undershoot. Explanations for phonetic reduction of predictable forms tend to take one of two approaches: Intelligibility-based accounts hold that talkers maximize intelligibility of words that might otherwise be difficult to recognize; productionbased accounts hold that variation reflects the speed of lexical access and retrieval in the language production system. Here we examine phonetic variation as a function of phonological neighborhood density, capitalizing on the fact that words from dense phonological neighborhoods tend to be relatively difficult to recognize, yet easy to produce.We show that words with many phonological neighbors tend to be phonetically reduced (shortened in duration and produced with more centralized vowels) in connected speech, when other predictors of phonetic variation are brought under statistical control. We argue that our findings are consistent with the predictions of production-based accounts of pronunciation variation.

Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages

“…Another example of a local variable is phonological neighborhood density (PND, Munson and Solomon, 2004;Wright, 2004;Munson, 2007;Gahl et al, 2012;Gahl, 2015;Buz and Jaeger, 2016). PND measures the number of words in the lexicon that are phonologically similar to a target word, indicating how many words exist in the lexicon that are potentially confusable with the target word.…”

“…As pointed out by Gahl et al (2012), both perspectives refer to the speed of retrieval: either retrieval in production or retrieval in comprehension. In production, increased difficulty of lexical access may be related to less frequent and contextually less predictable units, leading to longer or more spectrally distinctive realizations (cf.…”

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

“…The first is lexical predictability, which is where speakers produce certain words with shorter durations and/or greater phonological reduction when they are predictable. For example, speakers tend to use shorter pronunciations for frequent words, as well as words that are highly probable given the preceding and/or following word (Aylett & Turk, 2004;Bell et al, 2009;Frank & Jaeger, 2008;Gahl & Garnsey, 2004;Gahl et al, 2012;Jurafsky et al, 1998;Jurafsky et al, 2001). Another example comes from Lieberman (1963), where the word "nine" in the common maxim, "a stitch in time saves nine" has less emphasis (lower intelligibility) than in, "the next number you will hear is nine."…”

“…When words are redundant with the context, they are easier to retrieve and are pronounced with shorter durations (e.g., Aylett & Turk, 2004;Bell et al, 2009;Gahl et al, 2012;Jurafsky et al, 2001). Bell et al (2009) argued that the contextual probability of a word affects the speed at which it is accessed, and speakers utilize word duration as a mechanism to coordinate between planning and articulation, in order to maintain fluent delivery.…”

Typing pictures: Linguistic processing cascades into finger movements

“…Studies with spontaneous speech show that words from dense neighborhoods are phonetically reduced (Gahl, Yao & Johnson, 2012). Finally, paradigms based on semantic congruency effects produced very mixed evidence.…”