Time and Thyme Are not Homophones: The Effect of Lemma Frequency on Word Durations in Spontaneous Speech

By Susanne Gahl. 2008

409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Frequent words tend to shorten. But do homophone pairs, such as time and thyme, shorten equally if one member of the pair is frequent? This study reports an analysis of roughly 90,000 tokens of homophones in the Switchboard corpus of American English telephone conversations, in which it was found that high-frequency words like time are significantly shorter than their low-frequency homophones like thyme. The effect of lemma frequency persisted when local speaking rate, predictability from neighboring words, position relative to pauses, syntactic category, and orthographic regularity were brought under statistical control. These findings have theoretical implications for the locus of frequency information in linguistic competence and in models of language production, and for the role of articulatory routinization in shortening.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/970295540f88e5c38198481a7766ab4d0a26d45e

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech (2009, background): “…us to expect that the size of any e¤ect of duration reduction would be quite small (Bell et al. 2003; Pluymaekers et al. 2005; Kuperman et al. 2007; Gahl 2008; Bell et al. 2009), so it is important to minimize other e¤ects that are not in the model, such as the length or frequency of other words…”
Frequency in lexical processing (2016, background): “Frequency of occurrence is also predictive for many aspects of lexical form, including acoustic duration, length in phones or letters, tone, and pitch (Zipf, 1929; Gahl, 2008; Pluymaekers, Ernestus and Baayen, 2005; Wright, 1979; Tomaschek, Wieling, Arnold and Baayen, 2013, 2014; Zhao and Jurafsky, ”
Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech (2012, background): “As we have argued elsewhere (Gahl, 2008, 2009), measures such as familiarity, imageability, and syntactic category capture differences between words belonging to different syntactic categories, information that in turn affects the likely position of a word within prosodic constituents, and hence,…”
Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives (2015, background): “…finds that deletion of final /t,d/ in American English is more common in highly frequent forms (e.g., can’t, don’t) than in less frequent ones, and Gahl (2008) reports that vowel duration tends to be shorter in the more frequent member of homophone pairs (e.g., time and thyme) than in the less…”