Refine
Year of publication
- 2013 (2)
Document Type
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Artikulation (1)
- Deutsch (1)
- Prosodie (1)
- Vokal (1)
- Worthäufigkeit (1)
- Wortlänge (1)
- articulography (1)
- gam (1)
- learning (1)
- length (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (2)
Publisher
- International Speech Communications Association (2) (remove)
A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low frequency words. We found that word frequency differently affected the production of [i] and [a] at the temporal as well as the gestural level. Higher frequency of use predicted greater acoustic durations for long vowels; reduced durations for short vowels; articulatory trajectories with greater tongue height for [i] and more pronounced downward articulatory trajectories for [a]. These results show that the phonological contrast between short and long vowels is learned better with experience, and challenge both the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and current theories of German phonology.
The perception of prosodic prominence is influenced by different sources like different acoustic cues, linguistic expectations and context. We use a generalized additive model and a random forest to model the perceived prominence on a corpus of spoken German. Both models are able to explain over 80% of the variance. While the random forests give us some insights on the relative importance of the cues, the general additive model gives us insights on the interaction between different cues to prominence.