Determinants of phonetic word duration in ten language documentation corpora: Word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech

dc.contributor.author Strunk, Jan
dc.contributor.author Seifart, Frank
dc.contributor.author Danielsen, Swintha
dc.contributor.author Hartmann, Iren
dc.contributor.author Pakendorf, Brigitte
dc.contributor.author Wichmann, Søren
dc.contributor.author Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena
dc.contributor.author Bickel, Balthasar
dc.date.accessioned 2020-07-21T19:27:01Z
dc.date.available 2020-07-21T19:27:01Z
dc.date.issued 2020-07
dc.description.abstract This paper explores the application of quantitative methods to study the effect of various factors on phonetic word duration in ten languages. Data on most of these languages were collected in fieldwork aiming at documenting spontaneous speech in mostly endangered languages, to be used for multiple purposes, including the preservation of cultural heritage and community work. Here we show the feasibility of studying processes of online acceleration and deceleration of speech across languages using such data, which have not been considered for this purpose before. Our results show that it is possible to detect a consistent effect of higher frequency of words leading to faster articulation even in the relatively small language documentation corpora used here. We also show that nouns tend to be pronounced more slowly than verbs when controlling for other factors. Comparison of the effects of these and other factors shows that some of them are difficult to capture with the current data and methods, including potential effects of cross-linguistic differences in morphological complexity. In general, this paper argues for widening the cross-linguistic scope of phonetic and psycholinguistic research by including the wealth of language documentation data that has recently become available.
dc.description.sponsorship National Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.format.extent 39 pages
dc.identifier.citation Strunk, Jan, Frank Seifart, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, & Balthasar Bickel. 2020. Determinants of phonetic word duration in ten language documentation corpora: Word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech. Language Documentation & Conservation 14: 423-461.
dc.identifier.issn 1934-5275
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24926
dc.language.iso en-US
dc.publisher University of Hawaii Press
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States *
dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ *
dc.subject quantitative methods
dc.subject language documentation
dc.subject phonetic word duration
dc.subject endangered languages
dc.title Determinants of phonetic word duration in ten language documentation corpora: Word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech
dc.type Article
dc.type.dcmi Text
prism.endingpage 461
prism.publicationname Language Documentation & Conservation
prism.startingpage 423
prism.volume 14
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