Intelligibility versus redundancy—A study in Swedish

Abstract

The relationship between context redundancy and key-word intelligibility was examined in sentences having both high and low redundancy. The study partially replicates work done in 1963 by Philip Lieberman [Language and Speech 6 (Pt 3). 172–187 (1963)] in which he concluded that the degree of stress and carefulness of articulation of a word varies inversely with its redundancy. More words and more extreme redundancies in word pairs were used in the current study. These word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. With the text-type sentence pairs, there was an intelligibility advantage for the words in lower redundancy contexts. For the adage and spoken-sentence pairs, there was no intelligibility advantage for words in either context. The result that intelligibility and redundancy are inversely related in some instances (text-type sentences), even while reading test sentences, indicates that utterance planning for the speech production mechanism involves interpreting semantic information which may be expressed in fine adjustments in motor control.