Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech

By Harry J. Tily, Susanne Gahl, Inbal Arnon, Neal Snider, Anubha Kothari, Joan Bresnan. Language and Cognition, 2009

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction overwhelmingly more probable, marginally more probable, or no more probable than another. Here, we present evidence that acoustic features of spontaneous speech reflect these probabilities: when speakers choose a less probable construction, they are more likely to be disfluent, and their fluent words are likely to have a relatively longer duration. Conversely, words in more probable constructions are shorter and spoken more fluently. Our findings suggest that the differing probabilities of a syntactic construction in context are not epiphenomenal, but reflect a part of a speakers' knowledge of their language.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a05952bec1db42338b8b11d87281cf43ff6c4530

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Citations in the corpus

Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives (2015, background): “Tily et al. (2009) report a similar finding with dative verbs alternating between double-object (e.g., that gives them the full right to test the kids) and prepositional constructions (e.g., I haven’t given much thought to it), for which they find that the post-verbal complements are produced…”
Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English (2010, unknown): “Do other theories offer a better explanation of our findings? In their study of speakers’ pronunciation of the preposition to and other words in spontaneously produced dative constructions in spoken English, Tily et al. (2009) found a significant”
More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases (2010, background): “It is affected by word frequency (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), by the likelihood of a word given the previous one (Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, & Raymond, 2001), as well as by the likelihood of the syntactic structure the word is part of (Gahl & Garnsey, 2004; Jaeger, 2006; Tily et al., 2009).”
Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: five points of debate on current theory and methodology (2010, methodology): “In extending the 18 approach of Tily et al. (2009), one objective would be to design a method that could not only test the overall vahdity of a corpus model, but also the relative Status of factors and mteractions within that model.”
Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech (2012, unknown): “Phonolog ), doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011 Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Bybee, 2001; Fowler & Housum, 1987; Gahl, 2008, 2009; Gahl & Garnsey, 2004; Hunnicutt, 1985; Jurafsky, 2003; Quené, 2008; Tily et al., 2009).”
Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese (2015, result): “, those that are more easily inferrable) tend to be more reduced (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Frank & Jaeger, 2008; Gahl & Garnsey, 2004; Jaeger, 2010b, 2011; Resnik, 1996; Tily et al., 2009; Wasow, Jaeger, & Orr, 2011), although several of these findings have been claimed to be compatible with produ”
of construction probability on word durations during spontaneous incremental sentence production (2012, methodology): “The observed null effect of construction probability [p = 0.167] runs counter to the earlier finding of Tily et al. (2009) obtained from the same data set that is used here.”