Lexical frequency effects in Taiwan Southern Min syllable contraction

Abstract

Taiwan Southern Min syllable contraction, like many lenition processes, has long been thought to be influenced by lexical frequency. This has never been investigated quantitatively, however, because frequency estimates are not readily available. In this study, frequency estimates were derived from a small spoken corpus and from subjective judgments of both uncontracted and contracted forms. A production experiment was then run, with speakers shadowing randomly ordered disyllabic stimuli that eliminated contextual predictability. The dependent measures were acoustic correlates of intersyllabic segment reduction and tonal merger, and independent measures included lexical frequency, production latency, duration, and other phonetic and phonological factors. Regression analyses showed that both segment reduction and tonal merger correlated with lexical frequency, independently of all other factors. Further analyses suggested that despite the traditional description of syllable contraction in terms of categorical representations, the relationship between frequency and the degree of syllable contraction is gradient, with no evidence for an alternation between fully contracted and fully uncontracted forms.