Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonetics
• Speech Production

Background:

• Articulatory reduction is a common phenomenon in spoken language.
• Understanding factors influencing reduction is key to speech production models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between word repetition, contextual predictability, and articulatory reduction in Dutch.
• To determine how these factors affect different parts of words (stems and suffixes).

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 40 occurrences of seven frequent Dutch words with the suffix -lijk from conversational speech.
• Measurement of articulatory reduction via duration and number of realized phonetic segments.
• Statistical analysis of effects of repetition and predictability (from preceding and following words).

Main Results:

• Articulatory reduction was significantly affected by repetition and predictability.
• Repetition effects were primarily observed in suffixes.
• Predictability from the previous word impacted word stems, while predictability from the following word affected stems more broadly than suffixes.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that repetition and predictability play distinct roles in modulating articulatory reduction.
• Speech production models need to account for morpheme-specific and context-dependent variations in articulatory processes.