Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech

Kaidi Lõo, Fabian Tomaschek, Pärtel Lippus, Benjamin V. Tucker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that a word’s paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflected and uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words. Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size, such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higher conditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, we do not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final /-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discuss the results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologically complex words and their paradigmatic neighbors.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)474-499
Number of pages26
JournalLanguage and Speech
Volume66
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2023
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • acoustic durations
  • conditional probability
  • inflection
  • Morphological complexity
  • paradigm size

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Speech and Hearing

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