Word informativity influences acoustic duration: Effects of contextual predictability on lexical representation

Abstract

Language-users reduce words in predictable contexts. Previous research indicates that reduction may be stored in lexical representation if a word is often reduced. Because representation influences production regardless of context, production should be biased by how often each word has been reduced in the speaker’s prior experience. This study investigates whether speakers have a context-independent bias to reduce low-informativity words, which are usually predictable and therefore usually reduced. Content word durations were extracted from the Buckeye and Switchboard speech corpora, and analyzed for probabilistic reduction effects using a language model based on spontaneous speech in the Fisher corpus. The analysis supported the hypothesis: low-informativity words have shorter durations, even when the effects of local contextual predictability, frequency, speech rate, and several other variables are controlled for. Additional models that compared word types against only other words of the same segmental length further supported this conclusion. Words that usually appear in predictable contexts are reduced in all contexts, even those in which they are unpredictable. The result supports representational models in which reduction is stored, and where sufficiently frequent reduction biases later production. The finding provides new evidence that probabilistic reduction interacts with lexical representation.