Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:01:14.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Homophony and morphology: The acoustics of word-final S in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2015

INGO PLAG ,
JULIA HOMANN  and
GERO KUNTER
INGO PLAG*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
JULIA HOMANN*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
GERO KUNTER*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
*
Author’s address: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, D-40204 Düsseldorf, Germany [email protected]
Author’s address: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, D-40204 Düsseldorf, Germany [email protected]
Author’s address: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, D-40204 Düsseldorf, Germany [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent research has shown that homophonous lexemes show systematic phonetic differences (e.g. Gahl 2008, Drager 2011), with important consequences for models of speech production such as Levelt et al. (1999). These findings also pose the question of whether similar differences hold for allegedly homophonous affixes (instead of free lexemes). Earlier experimental research found some evidence that morphemic and non-morphemic sounds may differ acoustically (Walsh & Parker 1983, Losiewicz 1992). This paper investigates this question by analyzing the phonetic realization of non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, and of six different English /s/ and /z/ morphemes (plural, genitive, genitive-plural and 3rd person singular, as well as cliticized forms of has and is). The analysis is based on more than 600 tokens extracted from conversational speech (Buckeye Corpus, Pitt et al. 2007). Two important results emerge. First, there are significant differences in acoustic duration between some morphemic /s/’s and /z/’s and non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, respectively. Second, there are significant differences in duration between some of the morphemes. These findings challenge standard assumptions in morphological theory, lexical phonology and models of speech production.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , 01 February 2017 , pp. 181 - 216
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baayen, Rolf H. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Davidson, Douglas J. & Bates, Douglas M.. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59.4, 390–412.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald & Milin, Petar. 2010. Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research 3.2, 12–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Piepenbrock, Richard & Gulikers, Leon. 1995. The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Baker, Rachel, Smith, Rachel & Hawkins, Sarah. 2007. Phonetic differences between mis- and dis- in English prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words. The 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steven. 2014. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo. 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan, Brenier, Jason M., Gregory, Michelle, Girand, Cynthia & Jurafsky, Dan. 2009. Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60.1, 92–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berkovits, R. 1993. Progressive utterance-final lengthening in syllables with final fricatives. Language and Speech 36.1, 89–98.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David J. M.. 2013. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 4.3.14) (2005). http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Box, George E. P. & Cox, David R.. 1964. An analysis of transformations. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 26.2, 211–252.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Hopper, Paul J. (eds.). 2011. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Byrd, Dani, Krivokapic, Jelena & Lee, Sunqbok. 2006. How far, how long: On the temporal scope of prosodic boundary effects. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 120.3, 1589–1599.Google Scholar
Cho, Taehong. 2001. Effects of morpheme boundaries on intergestural timing: Evidence from Korean. Phonetica 58, 129–162.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. & Pater, Joe. 2011. The place of variation in phonological theory. The handbook of phonological theory, 2nd edn. 401–434.Google Scholar
Cooper, William E. 1976. Syntactic control of timing in speech production: A study of complement clauses. Journal of Phonetics 4.2, 151–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, William E., Paccia, Jeanne M. & Lapointe, Steven G.. 1978. Hierarchical coding in speech timing. Cognitive Psychology 10.2, 154–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawley, Michael J. 2002. Statistical computing: An introduction to data analysis using S-Plus. Chichester: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Cribari-Neto, Francisco & Zeileis, Achim. 2010. Beta Regression in R. Journal of Statistical Software 34.2, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008. The corpus of contemporary American English: 400+ million words, 1990–present. http://www.americancorpus.org/.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie. 2011. Sociophonetic variation and the lemma. Journal of Phonetics 39.4, 694–707.Google Scholar
Ernestus, Mirjam & Warner, Natasha. 2011. An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants. Journal of Phonetics 39, 253–260.Google Scholar
Ferrari, Silvia & Cribari-Neto, Francisco. 2004. Beta regression for modelling rates and proportions. Journal of Applied Statistics 31.7, 799–815.Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, Docherty, Gerard & Watt, Dominic. 2005. Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 81.1, 177–206.Google Scholar
Fowler, Carol A. 1988. Differential shortening of repeated content words produced in various communicative contexts. Language and Speech 31.4, 307–317.Google Scholar
Fowler, Carol A. & Housum, Jonathan. 1987. Talkers’ signalling of new and old words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language 26.5, 489–504.Google Scholar
Fromont, Robert & Hay, Jen. 2008. Onze miner: The development of a browser-based research tool. Corpora 3.2, 173–193.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne. 2008. Timeand thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84.3, 474–496.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gahl, Susanne & Yu, Alan C. L.. 2006. Special issue on exemplar-based models in linguistics. The Linguistic Review 23.3, 213–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gahl, Susanne, Yao, Yao & Johnson, Keith. 2012. Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language 66.4, 789–806.Google Scholar
Goad, Heather. 1998. Plurals in SLI: Prosodic deficit or morphological deficit? Language Acquisition 7.2-4, 247–284.Google Scholar
Goad, Heather, White, Lydia & Steele, Jeffrey. 2003. Missing inflection in L2 acquisition: Defective syntax or L1-constrained prosodic representations? The Canadian Journal of Linguistics/La revue canadienne de linguistique 48.2, 243–263.Google Scholar
Goldinger, Stephen D. 1998. Echoes of echos? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review 105.2, 251–279.Google Scholar
Hanique, Iris & Ernestus, Mirjam. 2012. The role of morphology in acoustic reduction. Lingue e Linguaggio 11.2, 147–164.Google Scholar
Hanique, Iris, Ernestus, Mirjam & Schuppler, Barbara. 2013. Informal speech processes can be categorical in nature, even if they affect many different words. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 133.3, 1644–1655.Google Scholar
Herberich, Esther, Sikorski, Johannes, Hothorn, Torsten & Rapallo, Fabio. 2010. A robust procedure for comparing multiple means under heteroscedasticity in unbalanced designs. PLoS ONE 5.3, e9788.Google Scholar
Holling, Heinz. 1983. Suppressor structures in the general linear model. Educational and Psychological Measurement 43.1, 1–9.Google Scholar
Homann, Julia, Plag, Ingo & Kunter, Gero. 2014. Against homophony: The acoustic properties of English S and D morphemes. 3rd International Society of the Linguistics of English Conference, August 24–27, Zurich.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Bretz, Frank & Westfall, Peter. 2008. Simultaneous inference in general parametric models. Biometrical Journal 50.3, 346–363.Google Scholar
Johnson, Keith. 2004. Massive reduction in conversational American English. Spontaneous speech: Data and analysis. The 1st Session of the 10th International Symposium, 29–54. Tokyo and Japan.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Allan, Gregory, Michelle & Raymond, William D.. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Bybee & Hopper (eds.), 229–254.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Alan & Girand, Cynthia. 2002. The role of the lemma in form variation. Laboratory Phonology 7, 3–34.Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia A. 2006. Phonetic encoding of prosodic structure. In Harrington, Jonathan & Tabain, Marija (eds.), Speech production: Models, phonetic processes, and techniques, 167–186. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie. 2002. A prosodic view of word form encoding for speech production. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 112–156.Google Scholar
Kemps, Rachel, Wurm, Lee H., Ernestus, Mirjam, Schreuder, Robert & Baayen, Harald. 2005b. Prosodic cues for morphological complexity in Dutch and English. Language and Cognitive Processes 20.1-2, 43–73.Google Scholar
Kemps, Rachèl, Ernestus, Mirjam, Schreuder, Robert & Baayen, R. Harald. 2005a. Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: The case of Dutch plural nouns. Memory & Cognition 33.3, 430–446.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. Lexical morphology and phonology. In Yang, In-Seok (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm: Selected papers from SICOL, 3–91. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
Klatt, Dennis H. 1976. Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 59.5, 1208–1221.Google Scholar
Klatt, Dennis H. & Cooper, William E.. 1975. Perception of segment duration in sentence contexts. In Cohen, Antonie & Nooteboom, Sibout G. (eds.), Structure and process in speech perception, 69–89. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Brockhoff, Per Bruun & Bojesen Christensen, Rune Haubo. 2014. lmerTest.http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lmerTest/index.html.Google Scholar
Lavoie, Lisa. 2002. Some influences on the realization of for and four in American English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32.02, 175–202.Google Scholar
Levelt, William J. M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levelt, William J. M., Roelofs, Ardi & Meyer, Antje S.. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22.01, 1–38.Google Scholar
Levelt, William J. M. & Wheeldon, Linda R.. 1994. Do speakers have access to a mental syllabary? Cognition 50.1, 239–269.Google Scholar
Li, Hsieh, Leonard, Laurence & Swanson, Lori. 1999. Some differences between English plural noun inflections and third singular verb inflections in the input: The contribution of frequency, sentence position and duration. Journal of Child Language 26.03, 531–543.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn. 1963. Spectrographic study of vowel reduction. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 35.11, 1773–1781.Google Scholar
Losiewicz, Beth L.1992. The effect of frequency on linguistic morphology. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.Google Scholar
Marian, Viorica, Bartolotti, James, Chabal, Sarah, Shook, Anthony & White, Stephanie Ann. 2012. CLEARPOND: Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities. PLoS ONE 7.8, e43230.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol & Jake, Janice. 2000. Four types of morpheme: Evidence from aphasia, code switching, and second-language acquisition. Linguistics 38.6, 1053–1100.Google Scholar
Nespor, Marina & Vogel, Irene. 2007. Prosodic phonology. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nooteboom, Sieb G. 1972. Production and perception of vowel duration: A study of the durational properties of vowels in Dutch. Utrecht: University of Utrecht.Google Scholar
Oh, Grace E. & Redford, Melissa A.. 2012. The production and phonetic representation of fake geminates in English. Journal of Phonetics 40.1, 82–91.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K. 1973. The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 54.5, 1235–1247.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Bybee & Hopper (eds.), 137–158.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.), Laboratory phonology VII, 101–140. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Pisoni, David B. & Levi, Susannah V.. 2009. Some observations on representations and representational specificity in speech perception and spoken word recognition. In Gaskell, Gareth (ed.), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, 3–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pitt, Mark A., Dilley, Laura, Johnson, Keith, Kiesling, Scott, Raymond, William, Hume, Elizabeth & Fosler-Lussier, Eric. 2007. Buckeye corpus of conversational speech (2nd release). Columbus, OH: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pluymaekers, Mark, Ernestus, Mirjam & Baayen, Harald. 2005a. Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy. Phonetica 62.2-4, 146–159.Google Scholar
Pluymaekers, Mark, Ernestus, Mirjam & Baayen, R. Harald. 2005b. Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118.4, 2561–2569.Google Scholar
Pluymaekers, Mark, Ernestus, Mirjam, Baayen, R. Harald & Booij, Geert. 2010. Morphological effects in fine phonetic detail: The case of Dutch -igheid. In Fougeron, Cécile (ed.), Laboratory phonology 10 (Phonology and Phonetics), 511–531. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
R Development coreteam. 2011. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. http://cran.r-project.org/.Google Scholar
Scheer, Tobias. 2010. A guide to morphosyntax–phonology interface theories: How extra-phonological information is treated in phonology since Trubetzkoy’s Grenzsignale. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Schwarzlose, Rebecca & Bradlow, Ann R.. 2001. What happens to segment durations at the end of the word? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109.5, 2292.Google Scholar
Shatzman, Keren B. & McQueen, James M.. 2006. Segment duration as a cue to word boundaries in spoken-word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics 68.1, 1–16.Google Scholar
Song, Jae Yung, Demuth, Katherine, Evans, Karen & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 2013. Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds’ American English: Voicing and morphemic factors. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 133.5, 2931–2946.Google Scholar
Sugahara, Mariko & Turk, Alice. 2009. Durational correlates of English sublexical constituent structure. Phonology 26.03, 477–524.Google Scholar
Sugahara, Mariko & Turk, Alice E.. 2004. Phonetic reflexes of morphological boundaries at a normal speech rate. In Bel, Bernard & Marlien, Isabelle (eds.), Speech Prosody 2004, 353–356.Google Scholar
Torreira, Francisco & Ernestus, Mirjam. 2009. Probabilistic effects on French [t] duration. INTERSPEECH, 448–451.Google Scholar
Turk, Alice E. & White, Laurence. 1999. Structural influences on accentual lengthening in English. Journal of Phonetics 27.2, 171–206.Google Scholar
Turk, Alice E. & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 2007. Multiple targets of phrase-final lengthening in American English words. Journal of Phonetics 35.4, 445–472.Google Scholar
Umeda, Noriko. 1977. Consonant duration in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 61.3, 846–858.Google Scholar
Venables, William N. & Ripley, Brian D.. 2002. Modern applied statistics with S-Plus, 4th edn. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Walsh, T. & Parker, F.. 1983. The duration of morphemic and non-morphemic /s/ in English. Journal of Phonetics 11.2, 201–206.Google Scholar
Wurm, Lee H. & Fisicaro, Sebastiano A.. 2014. What residualizing predictors in regression analyses does (and what it does not do). Journal of Memory and Language 72, 37–48.Google Scholar
Yung Song, Jae, Demuth, Katherine, Evans, Karen & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 2013. Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds’ American English: Voicing and morphemic factors. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 133.5, 2931–2946.Google Scholar
Zeileis, Achim. 2004. Econometric computing with HC and HAC covariance matrix estimators. Journal of Statistical Software 11.10, 1–17.Google Scholar
Zeileis, Achim. 2006. Object-oriented computation of sandwich estimators. Journal of Statistical Software 16.9, 1–16.Google Scholar