Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?
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Arne Lohmann
Abstract
Over the past decades a considerable number of works have observed differences in the phonetic realization of nouns and verbs. The guiding question in most relevant research is whether such differences are caused by grammatical category per se, or are triggered by more general processes of phonetic implementation that impact nouns and verbs differently. Most studies argue for the latter and focus on one particular process or variable, which is advocated to be responsible for the acoustic differences observed. Among the processes mentioned are pre-boundary lengthening, accentuation, and frequency-induced reduction. Due to the focus on monofactorial explanations, an overview and contextualization of the different processes interacting with the noun-verb distinction is yet missing. The present paper aims to fill this gap. This goal is pursed by providing an in-depth discussion of how grammatical category interacts with a number of different processes that affect acoustic realization. To that end results from the literature on the topic are synthesized with new acoustic analyses of noun-verb homophones from spontaneous speech. The analysis shows that differences in acoustic realization between nouns and verbs are caused by the complex interplay of a number of different processes, defying simple, monofactorial explanations.
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Award Identifier / Grant number: LO-2135/1-1
Acknowledgments
Many people deserve to be thanked for contributing to the work that is discussed in this article: First I would like to thank the members of the DFG Research Unit FOR 2373 “Spoken Morphology” for discussing my ideas with me on numerous occasions. Thanks also goes to Erin Conwell and Benjamin Tucker for collaborating with me on a number of aspects of the phonetics of nouns and verbs. Sonia Ben Hedia deserves to be thanked for providing very helpful feedback on a previous version of this article. Furthermore, I am grateful for the constructive comments by two anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are mine. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant LO-2135/1-1.
Noun-verb pairs investigated in the corpus analyses reported:
| act | end | needs | scene/seen |
| answer | excuse | notice | set |
| attack | face | offer | show |
| break | fall | order | shows |
| building | feeling | painting | sign |
| call | fight | pass | sleep |
| calls | fire | pay | sound |
| care | focus | plan | stand |
| cause | help | play | struggle |
| change | hope | practice | study |
| check | limit | raise | support |
| control | look | rent | talk |
| cook | love | reading | touch |
| cost | matter | respect | turn |
| cut | meet/meat | ride | waste |
| deal | mind | rode/road | work |
| dress | name | role/roll | vote |
| drive | need | run |
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Supplementary Material
The dataset and the R code used for the calculations reported in this article are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3605863
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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