The role of informativity and frequency in shaping word durations in English and in Polish

Abstract

Overall lexical frequency has long been known to play a role in sound change. Specifically, lexical frequency is negatively correlated with phonetic duration, and as such can be seen as a driver of diachronic reduction processes. However, recent findings suggest that it is the frequency of occurrence in a phonetic environment that favors a particular type of sound change, rather than overall lexical frequency, that shapes phonetic forms. For temporal reduction, Seyfarth (2014) shows that words that have a high frequency of occurrence in predictable contexts (low informativity words) are more temporally reduced than words that have a lower frequency of occurrence in predictable contexts (high informativity words). In this paper, I replicate Seyfarth’s (2014) finding using another corpus of unscripted English — the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper and Pisoni, 2006), as well as using a corpus of another language, Polish — the Greater Poland Spoken Corpus (Ka´zmierski et al., 2019; Kul et al., 2019). In both cases, informativity is included as a predictor of theoretical interest in mixed-effects linear regression models of word durations. Informativity, i. e. the frequency of occurrence in low-predictability contexts is shown to have a statistically significant effect on word durations in both English and Polish. Extending the analysis beyond a replication of Seyfarth (2014), a comparison of the effect of informativity and overall lexical frequency shows that the effect of informativity is somewhat weaker in Polish than in English, lending some support to the notion that morphologically rich languages are less sensitive to contextual predictability.