Linguistic units with lower predictability (i.e., higher surprisal) tend to be realized with stronger acoustic cues, so do units closer to a prosodic break. The study examined how predictability measurements such as lexical frequency, surprisal, and neighborhood density affect the variations of syllable duration and how these effects interact with durational marking of prosodic phrasing in Taiwan Southern Min. Speech data were extracted from an eight-hour spontaneous speech corpus. Surprisal was estimated with trigram language models trained on a written corpus with 4.13M words. Results show that syllable duration had a positive correlation with surprisal but a negative correlation with neighborhood density. As for positional effects, all predictability effects were neutralized at the pre-boundary syllable, even though there were still predictability effects in cases where penultimate and ante-penultimate lengthening is observed. These findings highlight how predictability effects are modulated by the durational marking of prosodic phrasing and have implications for an information theoretic view of the balance of signal redundancy in human speech.
Cite as: Wang, S.-F. (2022) Pre-boundary lengthening modulates predictability effects on durational variability in Taiwan Southern Min. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, 465-469, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-95
@inproceedings{wang22c_speechprosody,
author={Sheng-Fu Wang},
title={{Pre-boundary lengthening modulates predictability effects on durational variability in Taiwan Southern Min}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2022},
pages={465--469},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-95}
}