The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis: A Functional Explanation for Relationships between Redundancy, Prosodic Prominence, and Duration in Spontaneous Speech

By M. Aylett, A. Turk. Language and Speech, 2004

769 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb87e722f5d5230544791aafcddd964d5b63686e

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Citations in the corpus

of construction probability on word durations during spontaneous incremental sentence production (2012, background): “Yet another class of theories that predict phonetic effects of construction probability derives from the idea of information-smoothing (e.g., Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Jurafsky et al., 2001; Van Son & Pols, 2003; Van Son & Van Santen, 2005).”
Informativity affects consonant duration and deletion rates (2015, neutral): “Below the word level, several information theoretic factors such as frequency and predictability have been shown to affect segment, syllable, and morpheme duration and reduction (Aylett and Turk 2004, Aylett and Turk 2006; van Son and van Santen 2005; Pluymaekers et al. 2005; among others).”
Investigating locality effects and surprisal in written English syntactic choice phenomena. (2016, positive): “Aylett and Turk (2004) demonstrated that in human language production, predictability of words is related to their durations and articulatory detail.”
Typical Decoding for Natural Language Generation (2022, background): “Over the past century, many insights into the development and use of language have been made using an information-theoretic framework (Hale, 2001; Aylett and Turk, 2004; Collins, 2014; Piantadosi et al., 2011; Levy, 2018; Gib-son et al., 2019, inter alia ).”
Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication (2011, background): “…lexicon comes to re ﬂ ect predictability is that information content is known to in ﬂ uence the amount of time speakers take to pronounce a word: words and phones are given shorter pronunciations in contexts in which they are highly predictable or convey less information (7, 13, 27, 28, 35 – 38).”
The Goldilocks Effect: Human Infants Allocate Attention to Visual Sequences That Are Neither Too Simple Nor Too Complex (2012, background): “Similar hypotheses about how adults allocate their limited resources in the language domain–for example, those supporting a uniform information principle [33–37]–may suggest that what we have observed in infants reflects a ubiquitous constraint across domains and developmental levels.”
Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction (2006, methodology): “…at different levels of linguistic form (phonetic detail, detail of referring expressions, as well as omission of words, as in the case examined here) provides a means for speakers to smooth the information-density profile of their utterances (Aylett and Turk, 2004; Genzel and Charniak, 2002).”
Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech (2012, background): “The relationship between neighborhood density and confusability conforms to many people’s 1 Several of these proposals (Aylett & Turk, 2004; Jaeger, 2010; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; van Son & Pols, 2003) relate the reduction of highlypredictable forms to the pacing of information density throughout…”
Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech (2009, background): “For instance, Uniform Information Density (Jaeger 2006; Levy and Jaeger 2007; based on Genzel and Charniak 2002; Aylett and Turk 2004) posits that speakers tend to make the rate at which information is conveyed over the speech stream roughly constant, and therefore more predictable words (which…”
The effect of word predictability on reading time is logarithmic (2013, background): “…is that speakers seem to use various strategies to lengthen or shorten parts of their utterances so that the average predictability (as measured in bits) per unit time ends up being roughly constant (Aylett & Turk, 2004; Genzel & Charniak, 2002; Jaeger, 2010; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011).”
The communicative function of ambiguity in language. (2011, positive): “…used to explain phenomena such as discourse-level predictability (Genzel & Charniak, 2002, 2003; Piantadosi & Gibson, 2008; Qian & Jaeger, submitted), syntactic choice (Jaeger, 2006; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Jaeger, 2010) and reduction (Van Son & Pols, 2003; Aylett & Turk, 2004; Frank & Jaeger, 2008).”
Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review (2010, background): “There is a close relationship between frequency and probability and quantitative measures of prominence (Aylett, 2000; Aylett & Turk, 2004; Bard et al., 2000; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gregory, Healy, & Jurafsky, 2002; Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, & Raymond, 2001).”