Yuen, Ivan; Andreeva, Bistra; Ibrahim, Omnia; Möbius, Bernd
Prosodic factors do not always suppress discourse or surprisal factors on word-final syllable duration in German polysyllabic words
Lemke, Robin; Schäfer, Lisa; Reich, Ingo (Ed.): Information Structure and Information Theory, Language Science Press, pp. 215-234, Berlin, 2024.
Predictability is known to influence acoustic duration (e.g., Ibrahim et al. 2022) and prosodic factors such as accenting and boundary-related lengthening have been postulated to account for this effect (e.g., Aylett & Turk 2004). However, it has also been shown that other factors such as information status or speech styles could contribute to acoustic duration (e.g. Baker & Bradlow 2009). This raises the question as to whether acoustic duration is primarily subject to the influence of prosody that reflects linguistic structure including predictability. The current study addressed this question by examining the acoustic duration of word-final syllables in polysyllabic words in DIRNDL, a German radio broadcast corpus (e.g. Eckart et al. 2012). We analysed polysyllabic words followed by an intermediate phrase or an intonational phrase boundary, with or without accenting, and with given or new information status. Our results indicate that the acoustic duration of the word-final syllable was subject to the effect of prosodic boundary for long host words, in line with Aylett & Turk (2004); however, we also observed additional effects of information status, log surprisal and accenting for short host words, in line with Baker & Bradlow (2009). These results suggest that acoustic duration is subject to the influence of prosodic (e.g., boundary and accenting) and linguistic factors (e.g., information status and surprisal), and that the primacy of prosodic factors impacting on acoustic duration is further constrained by some intrinsic durational constraints, for example word length.