Cumulative usage effects on lexeme-final /s/: probability of being affixed

Abstract

It has been hypothesized that phonetically detailed memories accumulate in the mental space of a speaker. One piece of the evidence is that the production of a linguistic unit seems to be influenced by the context in which it has been used previously, regardless of the current or online context. This suggests that local usage effects may be memorized. Although these cumulative usage effects have been explored well in relation to contexts across words, they have been less studied with regards to contexts within a word. This study explores cumulative usage effects caused by contexts within a word, by examining the duration of lexeme-final /s/ in relation to the probability of the lexeme being affixed in English. It is demonstrated that the duration of lexeme-final /s/ is shorter when they are followed by bound morphemes, and this local usage effect becomes offline, that is, the duration of lexeme-final /s/ is shorter in a lexeme with higher probability of being followed by bound morphemes. This result is amenable to the explanation of Exemplar Theory, and this paper argues that exemplars encoding affixed and unaffixed forms are mentally represented in close distance and they interact each other to form a production target.