Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T06:25:56.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2014

Harry Tily ,
Susanne Gahl ,
Inbal Arnon ,
Neal Snider ,
Anubha Kothari  and
Joan Bresnan
Harry Tily*
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
Susanne Gahl*
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
Inbal Arnon
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
Neal Snider
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
Anubha Kothari
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
Joan Bresnan
Affiliation:
Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of Rochester
*
Correspondence addresses: Harry Tily, Linguistics, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Linguistics, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Keywords

pronunciation variationgradiencedisfluencyditransitiveword durationspeech productionsyntactic alternation
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 147 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2009

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.)

References

Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G. & Ratcliff, R.. 1996. Reliability of prosodie cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 22(3). 714–735.Google Scholar
Arnold, J., Wasow, T., Losongco, A. & Ginstrom, R.. 2000. Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76(1). 28–55.Google Scholar
Aylett, M. & Turk, A.. 2004. The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis: A functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic prominence and duration in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech 47(1). 31–56.Google Scholar
Baayen, H. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barlow, M. & Kemmer, S. (eds.). 2000. Usage-based models of language. Chicago: CSLI.Google Scholar
Bell, A., Brenier, J., Gregory, M., Girand, C. & Jurafsky, D.. 2009. Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60(1). 92–111.Google Scholar
Bell, A., Jurafsky, D., Fosler-Lussier, E., Girand, C., Gregory, M. & Gildea, D.. 2003. Effects of disfluencies, predictability, and utterance position on word form variation in English conversation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 113(2). 1001–1024.Google Scholar
Bod, R., Hay, J. & Jannedy, S. (eds.). 2003. Probabilistic linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Borensztajn, G., Zuidema, W. & Bod, R.. 2009. Children's grammars grow more abstract with age—Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language. Topics in Cognitive Science 1. 175–188.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brants, T. & Franz, A.. 2006. Web 1T 5-gram. Philadelphia, PA: LDC Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. 2008. Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation. In Featherston, S. & Sternefeld, W. (eds.), Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, 75–96. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T. & Baayen, H. R.. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In Bourne, G., Kraemer, I. & Zwarts, J. (eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. & Nikitina, T.. 2007. The gradience of the dative alternation. In Wee, L. H. & Uyechi, L. (eds.), Reality exploration and discovery: Pattern interaction in language and life. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds.). 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (Typological studies in language 45). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. 2002. Phonological evidence for exemplar storage of multiword sequences. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2). 215–222.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind's response to repetition. Language 82(4). 529–551.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Wasow, T.. 1998. Repeating words in spontaneous speech. Cognitive Psychology 37(3). 201–242.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Fox Tree, J. E.. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84(1). 73–111.Google Scholar
Deshmukh, N., Ganapathiraju, A., Gleeson, A., Hamaker, J. & Picone, J.. 1998. Resegmentation of Switchboard. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Sydney, Australia, Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. 1979. Discourse constraints on dative movement. In Givon, T. (ed.), Discourse and syntax, 441–467. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Fellbaum, C. 2005. Examining the constraints on the benefactive alternation by using the World Wide Web as a corpus. In Reis, M. & Kepser, S. (eds.), Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical and computational perspectives, 209–240. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ferreira, V. S. & Dell, G. S.. 2000. Effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production. Cognitive Psychology 40(4). 296–340.Google Scholar
Fox Tree, J. E. & Clark, H. H.. 1997. Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking. Cognition 62(2). 151–167.Google Scholar
Gahl, S. 2008. “Time” and “thyme” are not homophones: Word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84(3). 474–496.Google Scholar
Gahl, S. & Garnsey, S. M.. 2004. Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language 80(4). 748–775.Google Scholar
Gahl, S. & Garnsey, S. M.. 2006. Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language 82(2). 405–410.Google Scholar
Gahl, S., Garnse, S. M., Fisher, C. & Matzen, L.. 2006. “That sounds unlikely”: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation. 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, CD-ROM.Google Scholar
Gahl, S. & Yu, A. C. L.. (eds.). 2006. Special issue on Exemplar-based Models in Linguistics. The Linguistic Review 23(3).Google Scholar
Garnsey, S. M., Pearlmutter, N. J., Myers, E. & Lotocky, M. A.. 1997. The contributions of verb bias and plausibility to the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences. Journal of Memory & Language 37(1). 58–93.Google Scholar
Gelman, A. 2008. Scaling regression inputs by dividing by two standard deviations. Statistics in Medicine 27. 2865–2873.Google Scholar
Genzel, D. & Charniak, E.. 2002. Entropy rate constancy in text. In Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 199–206. Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Godfrey, J., Holliman, E. & McDaniel, J.. 1992. Switchboard: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.Google Scholar
Green, G. 1971. Some implications of an interaction among constraints. In Papers from the seventh regional meeting, 85–100. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Green, G. 1974. Semantics and syntactic regularity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gropen, J., Pinker, S.Hollander, M., Goldberg, R. & Wilson, R.. 1989. The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language 65(2). 203–257.Google Scholar
Harrell, F. E. 2007. Design: Design package. R Package version 2.1-1 [Computer software]. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=DesignGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. 2006. Redundancy and syntactic reduction in spontaneous speech. Stanford University, CA: Unpublished PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F., Snider, N., Staum, L. & Jurafsky, D.. 2006. (In)dependence of lexical and syntactic production: That-reduction and omission in spontaneous speech. Poster presented at the 19th annual CUNY conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Johnson, K. 1997. Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In Johnson, K. & Mullennix, (eds.), Talker variability in speech processing, 145–165. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M. & Raymond, W. D.. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production [References]. In Bybee, Joan and Hopper, Paul (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (Typological Studies in Language 45), 229–254. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kuperman, V. & Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M. & Baayen, R. H.. 2007. Morphological predictability and acoustic duration of interfixes in Dutch compounds. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121(4). 2261–2271.Google Scholar
Lawless, J. & Singhal, K.. 1978. Efficient screening on nonnormal regression models. Biometrics 34. 318–327.Google Scholar
Levy, R. & Jaeger, T. F.. 2007. Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction. In Schlökopf, B., Platt, J. & Hoffman, T. (eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems 19, 849–856. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P. 1963. Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech. Language and Speech 6. 172–187.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast. [References]. In Bybee, Joan and Hopper, Paul (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (Typological Studies in Language 45), 137–157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. In Gussenhoven, C. & Warner, N. (eds.), Laboratory phonology VII, 101–140. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M. & Baayen, R. H.. 2005. Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118(4). 2561–2569.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna.Google Scholar
Recchia, G. 2007. STRATA: Search Tools for Richly Annotated and Time-Aligned Linguistic Data. Stanford University, CA: Unpublished undergraduate honors thesis.Google Scholar
Schafer, A. J., Speer, S. R. & Warren, P.. 2005. Prosodic influences on the production and comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in a game-based conversation task. In Trueswell, J. C. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use, 209–225. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shriberg, E. 2001. To ‘errrr’ is human: Ecology and acoustics of speech disfluencies. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31(1). 153–169.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, B. & Hinrichs, L.. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Nevalainen, T., Taavitsainen, I., Pahta, P. & Korhonen, M. (eds.), The dynamics of linguistic variation: Corpus evidence on English past and present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K. & Kello, C.. 1993. Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition 19(3). 528–553.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. 2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar