The Phonetics of Word Class and its Representation in the Lexicon
Final Report Abstract
The present project investigated acoustic differences between English noun/verb homophones, such as kiss(V) / kiss(N) or answer(V) / answer(N) in order to deepen our understanding of effects of grammatical category on the speech signal. The project conducted production studies using both spontaneous speech from corpora and pronunciations produced in controlled laboratory settings, as well as perception experiments. In the first empirical study, acoustic differences were investigated in spontaneous American English. This analysis showed that the most robust acoustic differences between nouns and verbs of homophone pairs were clearly those on the durational dimension. It is durational differences which therefore formed the focus of the project’s investigations. The corpus study provided evidence for a lemma frequency effect co-determining durational differences between the noun and the verb of homophone pairs, with has implications for current speech production models and the specification of entries in the mental lexicon. In two production studies, corroborating evidence for the lemma frequency effect was obtained. Furthermore, it was shown that the acoustic realization of noun/verb homophones is also impacted by an effect of category-specific prosodic phrasing: Nouns are followed by prosodic boundaries of greater strength than verbs. A second production study replicated a reading experiment testing the phonetic implementation of lexical stress in disyllabic noun/verb homophones. It failed to obtain evidence for the effect reported in the original article. Hence no direct effect of grammatical category on the acoustics of lexical stress were found. The perceptual part of the project proved to be fairly challenging and was limited to the testing of acoustic detail in a forced choice and a lexical decision task. These experiments did no provide evidence for the storage of phonetic detail in the lexicon and can be explained within an abstractionist framework of lexical storage. In summary, the project contributed considerably to our understanding of effects of grammatical category on phonetic realization by identifying relevant factors responsible for such differences, as well as showing that certain factors previously postulated do not yield the effect that had been claimed. The empirical results obtained have implications for theories of speech production, perception and the mental lexicon. These are of general relevance beyond the current phenomenon and contribute to our understating of how phonetic realization is influenced by lexico-syntactic characteristics.
Publications
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(2020) Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?. Linguistics 58 (6) 1877–1911
Lohmann, Arne
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(2017). Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion. Word Structure 10(2), 204-234
Arne Lohmann
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(2018). Cut(N) and cut(V) are not homophones -Lemma frequency affects the duration of noun-verb conversion pairs. Journal of Linguistics 54(4), 753-777
Arne Lohmann
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(2018). Time and thyme are NOT homophones: a closer look at Gahl’s work on the lemma frequency effect including a reanalysis. Language 94(2), e180-e190
Arne Lohmann
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(2020). An is an, or is it? Plural and genitive-plural are not homophonous. In Livia Körtvélyessy & Pavel Stekauer (eds.) Complex Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. S. 260 – 292
Ingo Plag, Sonia Ben Hedia, Arne Lohmann & Julia Zimmermann
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(2020). No acoustic correlates of grammatical class – A critical reexamination of Sereno & Jongman (1995). Phonetica
Arne Lohmann
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(2020). Phonetic effects of grammatical category: How category-specific prosodic phrasing and token frequency impact the acoustic realization of nouns and verbs. Journal of Phonetics, 78, 100939
Arne Lohmann & Erin Conwell
