Wordform-specific frequency effects cause acoustic variation in zero-inflected homophones

Eva Maria Luef; Jong-Seung Sun

doi:10.1515/psicl-2020-0024

Article

Wordform-specific frequency effects cause acoustic variation in zero-inflected homophones

Eva Maria Luef and Jong-Seung Sun

Published/Copyright: March 1, 2021

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From the journal Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics Volume 56 Issue 4

Abstract

The frequency with which a word appears in the lexicon has implications for its pronunciation. Numerous studies have shown that high-frequency lemma are characterized by more phonetic reduction than lower-frequency lemma. These findings have proven to be particularly useful in the study of homophones where frequency-related reduction processes can give insights into lexical access theories. The majority of research on homophones and frequency effects has focused on heterographic and semantically unrelated homophones (e.g., English time – thyme) or investigated zero-derived homophones (e.g., English the cut, noun – to cut, verb). Here, zero inflection in German pluralization (e.g., ein Würfel ‘one die’– zwei Würfel ‘two dice’) was investigated to determine if and how frequency effects impact on the acoustic realization of the homophonous singular-plural word pairs. The findings indicate that the number-specified wordforms show acoustic variation related to wordform frequency and the relative frequency of the singular to plural inflected forms. Results differ for durations of wordforms, stem vowels, and final phonemes. Our findings have implications for lexical access theories and can inform about ‘frequency inheritance’ across the singular and plural homophones of the zero-inflected plurals.

Keywords: German; homophones; zero morphology; zero plurals; wordform frequency; lemma frequency

5 Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the ‘Research Resettlement Fund for New Faculty’ and the ‘Overhead Fund 2017’ of the College of Education of Seoul National University. We would like to thank Hyuksun Kwon, Hannah Kim, Christian Blum, and Magdalena Pelayo-van Buuren for their help during various stages of data collection. We are very grateful to Ingo Plag for critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also thank Gerald Luef for help with the figures.

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Published Online: 2021-03-01

Published in Print: 2020-12-16

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https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2020-0024

Keywords for this article

German; homophones; zero morphology; zero plurals; wordform frequency; lemma frequency