TY - JOUR
T1 - Determinants of phonetic word duration in ten language documentation corpora
T2 - Word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech
AU - Strunk, Jan
AU - Seifart, Frank
AU - Danielsen, Swintha
AU - Hartmann, Iren
AU - Pakendorf, Brigitte
AU - Wichmann, Søren
AU - Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena
AU - Bickel, Balthasar
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural heritage and community work. Here we show the feasibility of studying processes of online acceleration and deceleration of speech across languages using such data, which have not been considered for this purpose before. Our results show that it is possible to detect a consistent effect of higher frequency of words leading to faster articulation even in the relatively small language documentation corpora used here. We also show that nouns tend to be pronounced more slowly than verbs when controlling for other factors. Comparison of the effects of these and other factors shows that some of them are difficult to capture with the current data and methods, including potential effects of crosslinguistic differences in morphological complexity. In general, this paper argues for widening the cross-linguistic scope of phonetic and psycholinguistic research by including the wealth of language documentation data that has recently become available.
AB - This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural heritage and community work. Here we show the feasibility of studying processes of online acceleration and deceleration of speech across languages using such data, which have not been considered for this purpose before. Our results show that it is possible to detect a consistent effect of higher frequency of words leading to faster articulation even in the relatively small language documentation corpora used here. We also show that nouns tend to be pronounced more slowly than verbs when controlling for other factors. Comparison of the effects of these and other factors shows that some of them are difficult to capture with the current data and methods, including potential effects of crosslinguistic differences in morphological complexity. In general, this paper argues for widening the cross-linguistic scope of phonetic and psycholinguistic research by including the wealth of language documentation data that has recently become available.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101177001&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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AN - SCOPUS:85101177001
SN - 1934-5275
VL - 14
SP - 423
EP - 461
JO - Language Documentation and Conservation
JF - Language Documentation and Conservation
ER -