Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T09:33:28.884Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cut (n) and cut (v) are not homophones: Lemma frequency affects the duration of noun–verb conversion pairs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2017

ARNE LOHMANN
ARNE LOHMANN*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
*
Author’s address: Department of English and American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstrasse 1, 40225, Germany[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper tests whether lemma frequency impacts the duration of homographic noun–verb homophones in spontaneous speech, e.g. cut (n)/cut (v). In earlier research on effects of lemma frequency (e.g. Gahl 2008), these pairs of words were not investigated due to a focus on heterographic homophones. Theories of the mental lexicon in both linguistics and psycholinguistics differ as to whether these word pairs are assumed to have shared or separate lexical representations. An empirical analysis based on spontaneous speech from the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) yields the result that differences in lemma frequency affect the duration of the N/V pairs under investigation. First, this finding provides evidence for N/V pairs having separate representations and thus supports models of the mental lexicon in which lexical entries are specified for word class. Second, the result is at odds with an account of ‘full inheritance’ of frequency across homophones and consequently with speech production models implementing inheritance effects via a shared form representation for homophonous words. The findings are best accounted for in a model that assumes completely separate lexical representations for homophonous words.

Keywords

conversionfrequency effectshomophonesspeech productionword class
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , 01 November 2018 , pp. 753 - 777
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

I thank the members of the Research Unit ‘Spoken Morphology’, and in particular Peter Indefrey and Frauke Hellwig, for helpful feedback on this study. I am grateful to Benjamin Tucker for sharing his Praat scripts for the Buckeye corpus. Furthermore, I wish to thank Gero Kunter for discussing operationalization questions in testing the lemma frequency effect with me, and Ingo Plag and Thomas Berg for commenting on previous versions of this paper. I furthermore thank the audience at the 173rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Boston. Moreover, three anonymous reviewers deserve to be thanked for helpful comments. Funding for this study by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged (grant LO-2135/1-1).

References

Baayen, R. Harald, Piepenbrock, R. & van Rijn, H.. 2001. WebCelex, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Online resource. http://celex.mpi.nl.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Milin, Petar & Ramscar, Michael. 2016. Frequency in lexical processing. Aphasiology 30.11, 1174–1220.Google Scholar
Barner, David & Bale, Alan. 2002. No nouns, no verbs: Psycholinguistic arguments in favor of lexical underspecification. Lingua 112, 771–791.Google Scholar
Barr, Dale J., Levy, Roger, Scheepers, Christoph & Tily, Harry J.. 2013. Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68.3, 255–278.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steven. 2014. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. http://cran.r-project.org/package=lme4.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo. 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baxter, Doreen M. & Warrington, Elizabeth K.. 1985. Category specific phonological dysgraphia. Neuropsychologia 23.5, 653–666.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan, Jurafsky, Daniel, Fosler-Lussier, Eric, Girand, Cynthia, Gregory, Michelle & Gildea, Daniel. 2003. Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 113.2, 1001–1024.Google Scholar
Biedermann, Britta & Nickels, Lyndsey. 2008. Homographic and heterographic homophones in speech production: Does orthography matter? Cortex: A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior 44.6, 683–697.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David J. M.. 2016. Praat. Doing phonetics by computer, version 6.0.14.http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Bonin, Patrick & Fayol, Michel. 2002. Frequency effects in the written and spoken production of homophonic picture names. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 14.3, 289–313.Google Scholar
Box, George & Cox, David. 1964. An analysis of transformations. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) 26.2, 211–252.Google Scholar
Bram, Barli. 2011. Major total conversion in English: The question of directionality. Ph.D. thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc & New, Boris. 2009. Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods 41.4, 977–990.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc, New, Boris & Keuleers, Emmanuel. 2012. Adding part of speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies. Behavior Research Methods 44.4, 991–997.Google Scholar
Caramazza, Alfonso, Costa, Albert, Miozzo, Michele & Bi, Yanchao. 2001. The specific-word frequency effect: Implications for the representation of homophones in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27.6, 1430–1450.Google Scholar
Caramazza, Alfonso & Hillis, Argye E.. 1991. Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain. Nature 349, 788–790.Google Scholar
Cohn, Abby, Brugman, Johann, Crawford, Clifford & Joseph, Andrew. 2005. Lexical frequency effects and phonetic duration of English homophones: An acoustic study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118, 2036.Google Scholar
Conwell, Erin. 2015. Neural responses to category ambiguous words. Neuropsychologia 69, 85–92.Google Scholar
Conwell, Erin. 2016. Prosodic disambiguation of noun/verb homophones in child-directed speech. Journal of Child Language 44.3, 734–751.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2014. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990–2012 [Full-Text Corpus Data, Version of 2014]. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.Google Scholar
Don, Jan. 2004. Categories in the lexicon. Linguistics 42, 931–956.Google Scholar
Farrell, Patrick. 2001. Functional shift as category underspecification. English Language and Linguistics 5.1, 109–130.Google Scholar
Frisson, Steven & Pickering, Martin J.. 1999. The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 25.6, 1366–1383.Google Scholar
Foraker, Stephani & Murphy, Gregory L.. 2012. Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance. Journal of Memory and Language 67.4, 407–425.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne. 2008. Timeand Thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84.3, 474–496.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne. 2009. Homophone duration in spontaneous speech: A mixed-effects model. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report 1, 279–298.Google Scholar
Guion, Susan G. 1995. Word frequency effects among homonyms. Texas Linguistic Forum 35, 103–116.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Hale, Ken & Keyser, Samuel J. (eds.), The View from Building 20, Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hillis, Argye E. & Caramazza, A.. 1995. Representation of grammatical categories of words in the brain. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7.3, 396–407.Google Scholar
Jescheniak, Jörg & Levelt, Willem J.. 1994. Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20.4, 824–843.Google Scholar
Jescheniak, Jörg D., Meyer, Antje S. & Levelt, Willem J. M.. 2003. Specific-word frequency is not all that counts in speech production: Comments on Caramazza, Costa, et al. (2001) and new experimental data. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 29.3, 432–438.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel. 2003. Probabilistic modeling in psycholinguistics: Linguistic comprehension and production. In Hay, Jennifer, Bod, Rens & Jannedy, Stefanie (eds.), Probabilistic Linguistics, 39–95. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Alan & Girand, Cynthia. 2002. The role of the lemma in form variation. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology VII, 1–34. Berlin/New York: Mouton/de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kittredge, Audrey K., Dell, Gary S., Verkuilen, Jay & Schwartz, Myrna F.. 2008. Where is the effect of frequency in word production? Insights from aphasic picture-naming errors. Cognitive Neuropsychology 25.4, 463–492.Google Scholar
Klein, Devorah E. & Murphy, Gregory L.. 2001. The representation of polysemous words. Journal of Memory and Language 45.2, 259–282.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Brockhoff, Per Bruun & Bojesen Christensen, Rune Haubo. 2014. lmerTest.http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lmerTest/index.html.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational phonology 2nd edn. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 119). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lefcheck, Jonathan S. & Freckleton, Robert. 2016. piecewiseSEM: Piecewise structural equation modelling in R for ecology, evolution, and systematics. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7.5, 573–579.Google Scholar
Levelt, Willem J. M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levelt, Willem J. M., Roelofs, Ardi & Meyer, Antje S.. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22.1, 1–75.Google Scholar
Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax. Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In Dimitriadis, Alexis & Siegel, Laura (eds.), University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4.2, 201–225. Penn Graduate Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Middleton, Erica L., Chen, Qi & Verkuilen, Jay. 2015. Friends and foes in the lexicon: Homophone naming in aphasia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 41.1, 77–94.Google Scholar
Miozzo, Michele & Caramazza, Alfonso. 2005. The representation of homophones: Evidence from the distractor-frequency effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31.6, 1360–1371.Google Scholar
Pitt, Mark A., Dilley, Laura, Johnson, Keith, Kiesling, Scott, Raymond, William, Hume, Elizabeth & Fosler-Lussier, Eric. 2007. Buckeye corpus of conversational speech, 2nd release. Columbus, OH: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University. www.buckeyecorpus.osu.edu.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo, Homann, Julia & Kunter, Gero. 2017. Homophony and morphology: The acoustics of word-final S in English. Journal of Linguistics 53.1, 181–216.Google Scholar
Princeton University 2010. ‘About WordNet’. WordNet. Princeton University. http://wordnet.princeton.edu.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1990. A comprehensive grammar of the English language, 8th impression, standard edn. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
R Development coreteam 2011. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. http://cran.r-project.org/.Google Scholar
Sorensen, John M., Cooper, William E. & Paccia, Jeanne M.. 1978. Speech timing of grammatical categories. Cognition 6.2, 135–153.Google Scholar
Tucker, Benjamin V. & Brenner, Daniel. 2016. Massive auditory lexical decision: Going big in the auditory domain, Talk held at Mental Lexicon 2016, Ottawa.Google Scholar
Turk, Alice E. & White, Laurence. 1999. Structural influences on accentual lengthening in English. Journal of Phonetics 27.2, 171–206.Google Scholar
Velasco, Daniel García. 2009. Conversion in English and its implications for Functional Discourse Grammar. Lingua 119.8, 1164–1185.Google Scholar
Venables, W. N. & Ripley, B. D.. 2002. Modern applied statistics with s, 4th edn. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Whalen, D. H. 1991. Infrequent words are longer in duration than frequent words. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90, 2311.Google Scholar