Abstract
The following paper explores the link between production difficulty and grammatical variability. Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). When 20 morphosyntactic variables are considered collectively (N= 6,268), there is no positive effect. In other words, variable contexts do not correlate with measurable production difficulties. These results challenge the view that grammatical variability is somehow sub-optimal for speakers, with additional burdensome cognitive planning.
Highlights
This paper introduces a new research agenda aimed at exploring the link between language complexity and variation as inherent properties of language use
Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses and unfilled pauses
If the processing of variation adds to this cognitive load it is expected that there would be a positive correlation between disfluency/speech planning time and variable contexts
Summary
This paper introduces a new research agenda aimed at exploring the link between language complexity and variation as inherent properties of language use. We assess the complexity incurred by having to choose between competing grammatical variants. The idea that grammatical variation might burden language production deserves scrutiny not primarily because language users are forced to make grammatical choices—after all, using language always entails plenty of choice-making—but rather, because grammatical variation (as opposed to e.g., lexical variation) is conditioned probabilistically by any number of contextual constraints. Even before language users can make a choice as a function of the naturalness of grammatical variants in a specific linguistic context, they need to check that linguistic context for the various constraints that regulate the variation at hand
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