This study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morphologically complex words in spoken Dutch. The hypothesis that high-frequency words are more reduced than low-frequency words was tested by comparing the durations of affixes occurring in different carrier words. Four Dutch affixes were investigated, each occurring in a large number of words with different frequencies. The materials came from a large database of face-to-face conversations. For each word containing a target affix, one token was randomly selected for acoustic analysis. Measurements were made of the duration of the affix as a whole and the durations of the individual segments in the affix. For three of the four affixes, a higher frequency of the carrier word led to shorter realizations of the affix as a whole, individual segments in the affix, or both. Other relevant factors were the sex and age of the speaker, segmental context, and speech rate. To accommodate for these findings, models of speech production should allow word frequency to affect the acoustic realizations of lower-level units, such as individual speech sounds occurring in affixes.
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October 2005
October 01 2005
Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch
Mark Pluymaekers;
Mark Pluymaekers
Radboud University Nijmegen
, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Mirjam Ernestus;
Mirjam Ernestus
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University Nijmegen
, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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R. Harald Baayen
R. Harald Baayen
Radboud University Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 118, 2561–2569 (2005)
Article history
Received:
December 02 2004
Accepted:
July 09 2005
Citation
Mark Pluymaekers, Mirjam Ernestus, R. Harald Baayen; Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 October 2005; 118 (4): 2561–2569. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2011150
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