Word frequency, predictability, and lexical class influence different aspects of Spanish tonic vowel production

Abstract

The influence of lexical factors on speech production has not yet been investigated in Spanish to the same extent as for other languages such as English, French, Dutch, and German. Addressing this literature gap, the present study investigates how word frequency, predictability, and lexical class affect the duration and first two formant values of tonic monophthong vowels (hereafter vowels) produced by monolingual Spanish speakers from Madrid using the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish [Torreira and Ernestus, LREC'10 (2010), pp. 2981–2985]. A tonic vowel is defined as the most prominent vowel in a word's citation form. Word frequency and predictability based on the preceding word were calculated using the Spanish data from the OpenSubtitle corpus [Lison and Tiedemann, LREC'16 (2016), pp. 923–929]. Results of statistical modelling showed that the three aspects of vowel production under study were affected by all the examined lexical characteristics, although the effect sizes were small. Results are discussed in the context of previous work on Spanish vowels and cross-linguistic trends in speech production.