Frequency and category factors in the reduction and assimilation of function words

Abstract

It has been observed that there are phonetic and phonological differences between function words and content words. However, it is unclear whether these differences are actually the result of the distinct syntactic categories, or of other secondary effects such as frequency or stress. A production experiment was conducted to distinguish between the factors of category and frequency while controlling for stress. EPG and acoustic data were collected for five subjects. The effects of the two factors were examined within several processes of reduction and assimilation, including final-t/d dropping, initial-/h/ dropping, and palatalization. Preliminary results suggest that both word frequency and category are important factors in these processes. The consonant-dropping processes seem to show a strong sensitivity to category, but also show within-category effects of frequency. Palatalization appears to be a more gradient phonetic process, with results thus far suggesting greater sensitivity to frequency than to category. The fact that the same processes were affected by both factors suggests that at least some of the phonetic and phonological properties traditionally assigned to function words as a category may be wholly or partly the result of high word frequency. [Research supported by NSERC.]