Predictability Effects on Durations of Content and Function Words in Conversational English

By Alan Bell, Jason M. Brenier, M. Gregory, Cynthia Girand, Dan Jurafsky. 2009

699 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a4b37d516a5e1665992f008565e1e77a89390ed

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond Word Frequency: Bursts, Lulls, and Scaling in the Temporal Distributions of Words (2009, background): “In psycholinguistics, the local likelihood (or predictability) of words is a central focus of current research [13].”
Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech (2009, background): “Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of more and more models that conceive of structure as gradient, malleable, and probabilistic (see for example the papers in Barlow and Kemmer (2000); Bod et al. (2003); Bybee and Hopper (2001); and Gahl and Yu (2006)).”
Phonetic bias in sound change (2011, background): “For example, less frequent words tend to be pronounced with greater duration or greater articulatory effort than their more frequent homophones (Guion 1995); see Gahl (2008) and Bell et al. (2009) with references to other earlier work describing a range of leniting effects. This leads to an expectat”
Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech (2012, background): “Using the same word multiple times in a discourse tends to promote shortening and possibly other types of phonetic reduction (Bard et al., 2000; Bell et al., 2009; Fowler, 1988; Fowler & Housum, 1987; Gahl, 2009).”
Prosodic and temporal features for language modeling for dialog (2012, background): “We first considered speaking rate, as likely to indicate degree of preparation and confidence, and because word durations are strongly affected by frequency and predictability (Bell et al., 2009; Bradlow and Baker, 2009).”
50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next … (2013, methodology): “Bell et al. 2009 and Raymond & Brown 2012 for recent applications). However, there is so far hardly any work which explored its use as a measure of collocational strength. Two exceptions are Michelbacher et al. (2007, 2011). Michelbacher et al. (2007) compute conditional probabilities based on adjec”
Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density (2010, background): “…distributions during production are connectionist accounts (Dell, Chang, & Griffin, 1999; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and work on probability-sensitive production (e.g. Aylett & Turk, 2004; Bell et al., 2003, 2009; Gahl & Garnsey, 2004; Resnik, 1996; Stallings, MacDonald, & O’Seaghdha, 1998).”
of construction probability on word durations during spontaneous incremental sentence production (2012, background): “The modified model assumes that lexical access is slowed or speeded by frequencydriven activation, and proposes ‘‘a mechanism of fluent speech that helps coordinate lexical access and/or phonological encoding and the execution of the articulatory plan’’ (Bell et al., 2009: 106-7).”
Informativity affects consonant duration and deletion rates (2015, neutral): “At the word level, related work found that frequent and predictable words tend to have shorter duration (Jurafsky et al. 2001; Bell et al. 2009; among others).”
Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review (2010, background): “Bell et al. (2009) argue that lengthening may relate to difficulties with lexical access.”
More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases (2010, background): “For example, in a corpus study of word duration, Bell et al. (2009) found that different predictability measures affected the duration of function words and content words: both content and function words were shorter when they were predictable given the following word, but only very frequent functio”
Source and Translation Classification using Most Frequent Words (2013, background): “High frequency function words are relatively shorter than mid/low frequency function words (Bell et al., 2008).”