ACLC Researcher Frank Seifart has been awarded a Volkswagen foundation DoBeS grant
Articulation speed variation cross-linguistically
When people speak, they constantly speed up and slow down, i.e. they modulate their articulation speed. At what particular points in discourse do these modulations occur and why?
This project investigates variation in the articulation speed of words in context in a set of corpora from ten languages spoken all around the world, from the Amazonian rainforest (Bora and Baure), to Mexico (Texistepec Popoluca), the North American great plains (Hoocąk), Siberia (Sakha and Even), the Himalaya (Chintang), the Kalahari desert (Nǀuu), and to urban Western Europe (Dutch) and the USA (English). This diversity will allow us to identify, on the one hand, the universal features of articulation speed variation, which we hypothesize are connected to general properties of human cognition, and, on the other hand, language-specific features, which are probably related to properties of the grammar of individual languages or are culture-specific, e.g. rooted in local narrative traditions and conversational strategies. This project addressed three specific sets of questions:
(i) Are some words pronounced faster because they are frequent or otherwise predictable in the local context? This may lead to phonological and morphological reduction and ultimately language change;
(ii) Are some words pronounced faster because they are longer, containing more phonological segments, and/or because they are morphologically complex? Do speakers thus take the morphology of words into account when pronouncing them?
(iii) Are some words pronounced slower because they mark the end of a discourse boundary, e.g. in final lengthening? And how do individual languages differ in this respect?