Previous research suggests that words with a high level of language redundancy (i.e. recognition likelihood from familiarity and predictability based on syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic factors) have reduced acoustic salience, such as shorter duration and reduced vowels. The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis proposes that acoustic salience is controlled via prosodic structure, and makes the prediction that parameters such as fundamental frequency should also be affected by language redundancy. This study investigates the relationship of F0 with lexical frequency, together with bigram (verb-adjective or adjective-noun) frequency and the ratio between these two bigram frequencies. Results from a carefully controlled experiment with quadruplets of minimal pairs suggests that language redundancy can affect fundamental frequency in English.
Related talks:
redundancy
Language redundancy effects on F0: A preliminary controlled study
Cong Zhang, Catherine Lai, Ricardo Souza, Alice Turk, and Tina Bögel
Proceeding of 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Prague, Czech Republic, Aug 2023
Previous research suggests that words with a high level of language redundancy (i.e. recognition likelihood from familiarity and predictability based on syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic factors) have reduced acoustic salience, such as shorter duration and reduced vowels. The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis proposes that acoustic salience is controlled via prosodic structure, and makes the prediction that parameters such as fundamental frequency should also be affected by language redundancy. This study investigates the relationship of F0 with lexical frequency, together with bigram (verb-adjective or adjective-noun) frequency and the ratio between these two bigram frequencies. Results from a carefully controlled experiment with quadruplets of minimal pairs suggests that language redundancy can affect fundamental frequency in English.