Abstract
Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic>plural>clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is- and has-clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production.
Highlights
Recent research on the acoustic properties of seemingly homophonous elements has shown unexpected effects of morphological structure on their phonetic realisation
The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics
In our final model, fitted according to the procedure described above, we found main effects of type of S (TYPEOFS), speaking rate (SPEAKINGRATE), base duration (BASEDURLOG), pause (PAUSEBIN), biphone probability sum (BIPHONEPROBSUMBIN), preceding consonant (PREC), following segmental type (FOLTYPE), and mono-/multilingualism (MONOMULTILINGUAL)
Summary
Recent research on the acoustic properties of seemingly homophonous elements has shown unexpected effects of morphological structure on their phonetic realisation. Li et al 1999; Plag et al 2019; Seyfarth et al 2017; Walsh and Parker 1983) found seemingly identical word-final S to be realised differently depending on its morphological category Their results are not as clear as those of the previously mentioned corpus studies. One major drawback of all previous studies is the potentially confounding phonetic realisation effects of the lexical and contextual properties of the items under investigation Examples of such effects are, for instance, prosodic effects arising from different contexts in which the items of interest appear We first describe covariates used as fixed effects before we turn to variables used as random effects
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