Soskuthy, Marton and Hay, Jennifer (2017) Changing word usage predicts changing word durations in New Zealand English. Cognition. pp. 298-313. ISSN 0010-0277
Abstract
This paper investigates the emergence of lexicalized effects of word usage on word duration by looking at parallel changes in usage and duration over 130 years in New Zealand English. Previous research has found that frequent words are shorter, informative words are longer, and words in utterance-final position are also longer. It has also been argued that some of these patterns are not simply online adjustments, but are incorporated into lexical representations. While these studies tend to focus on the synchronic aspects of such patterns, our corpus shows that word-usage patterns and word durations are not static over time. Many words change in duration and also change with respect to frequency, informativity and likelihood of occurring utterance-finally. Analysis of changing word durations over this time period shows substantial patterns of co-adaptation between word usage and word durations. Words that are increasing in frequency are becoming shorter. Words that are increasing/decreasing in informativity show a change in the same direction in duration (e.g. increasing informativity is associated with increasing duration). And words that are increasingly appearing utterance-finally are lengthening. These effects exist independently of the local effects of the predictors. For example, words that are increasing utterance-finally lengthen in all positions, including utterance-medially. We show that these results are compatible with a number of different views about lexical representations, but they cannot be explained without reference to a production-perception loop that allows speakers to update their representations dynamically on the basis of their experience.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Authors. |
Keywords: | Informativity,Language change,New Zealand English,Production-perception loop,Word duration,Word frequency |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Language and Linguistic Science (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 25 May 2018 10:30 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jan 2025 00:10 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.032 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.032 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:131314 |
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