Abstract
Words that can occur in more than one lexical category produce regions of ambiguity that could confound language learning and processing. However, previous findings suggest that pronunciation of noun/verb homophones may, in fact, differ as a function of category of use, potentially mitigating that ambiguity. Whether these differences are part of the lexical representation of such words or mere by-products of sentence-level prosodic processes remains an open question, the answer to which is critical to resolving questions about the structure of the lexicon. In three studies, adult native speakers of English read aloud passages containing noun/verb homophones or nonce words used in both noun and verb contexts. Acoustic measurements of the target words indicated that, while sentence position influences the acoustic properties of noun/verb homophones, including duration and pitch, there are not significant effects of lexical category when other factors are controlled. Furthermore, the lexical status of a word (real or nonce) does not produce consistent prosodic effects. These findings suggest that previously reported prosodic differences in noun/verb homophones may result from the syntactic positions in which those categories tend to occur.
Highlights
These findings suggest that lexical category does not affect the prosody of noun/verb homophones when sentence position is controlled for
1.51 1.11 8.64 lengthening and increased pitch and pitch range (ShattuckHufnagel and Turk, 1996). Finding such effects suggests that participants were reading the stimuli in a naturalistic manner with sentence-level prosody that was typical for English
The effects of lexical status on token duration, that nonce tokens had shorter duration than real tokens, and that real tokens show larger effects of sentence position than nonce tokens do, may indicate that participants were less natural in their production of sentences containing nonce words than those with real words
Summary
Some of this ambiguity stems from words that have multiple meanings. Some homophones and polysemes encode different meanings, and belong to different grammatical categories (e.g., run may be used as both a noun and a verb) Such ambicategorical words could pose a significant challenge for language learning and processing, as they introduce both lexical and structural ambiguities into speech. Children learn these words without apparent difficulty and adult speakers produce and process them every day, suggesting that the ambiguity they create is mitigated by other factors
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
