Abstract
Japanese has a rich verbal conjugation system. For example, the lemma miru may be realized as the non-past indicative form miru, the past indicative form mita, or the imperative form miro. A verb is conjugated depending on a variety of factors such as aspect and mood. That is, a speaker has to choose an appropriate conjugated form in speech production. The aim of this study is to explore whether the production of a verb is influenced by the probability of choosing a conjugated form given the verbal lemma. Our corpus-based research demonstrates that, if a verb has been produced as a non-past indicative form frequently, the verb is produced with shorter duration when produced as the non-past indicative form. This result can be neatly captured by positing that a speaker stores both episodic memories and abstract categories (i.e., lemma and conjugation form), and that the ease in production target creation is a function of the resting activation level of an abstract category.
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Notes
I deeply thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this problem to my attention.
There is an alternative view called a listener-oriented approach (Pate & Goldwater, 2015; Rose, 2017; Hall et al., 2018), which can also put forward a similar prediction. This type of account hypothesizes that a speaker balances two competing biases: a pressure to minimize articulatory effort and a pressure to transmit a message accurately (Jaeger & Buz, 2017; Rose, 2017). When a speaker thinks that a listener can infer what kind of message the speaker conveys, the speaker is supposed to minimize articulatory effort, and thereby the speaker produces a reduced speech signal (e.g., a signal with shorter duration and that with centralized formant values). This is because, if the message is inferable in speech settings, the communication is potentially successful without clear acoustic signals. It would be easy for a listener to recognize a non-past indicative form with higher conjugation predictability. The reason is that they are exposed to the conjugation form frequently in speech, and they store a large number of exemplars encoding the conjugation form, which allow a listener to access the conjugation node with ease. Consequently, a speaker does not have to improve the intelligibility of the speech signal, with the result that the duration becomes shorter.
Bell et al. (2021) put forward a similar hypothesis. They posit that a linguistic unit with a greater activation level receives more enhanced articulation.
The so-called paradigmatic enhancement effects can be interpreted in another way. Cohen (2015) accounts for the signal enhancement by positing that all the exemplars in a lexical category are averaged together to create a production target. Consequently, the pronunciation of a conjugation form shifts towards the more frequent conjugation form within the paradigm. Tomaschek et al. (2021) posit that a higher paradigmatic probability increases the learnability of a word form, and the greater learnability is somehow associated with clear speech articulation.
So far, we have mainly discussed the probabilistic reduction by positing that the phonetic redundancy in a speech signal reflects the speed in which a speaker accesses a conjugation node when producing a verb (Gahl, 2008; Bell et al., 2009; Gahl et al., 2012). As discussed in Sect. 2, there is an alternative view called a listener-oriented approach (Pate & Goldwater, 2015; Rose, 2017; Hall et al., 2018), which can also account for the findings in the current study. According to the listener-oriented account, a speaker is supposed to minimize articulatory effort (i.e., produce a speech signal with shorter duration), when the speaker thinks that the intended message is easy for a listener to retrieve. In the case of the current study, a non-past indicative form with higher conjugation predictability is produced with a reduced speech signal because the speaker thinks that the non-past indicative form would be easy for a listener to recognize. This communicative ease account should be tested further using a perceptual experiment in future work (see Allen et al., 2005; Cohen & Kang, 2018). According to our corpus-based data, the verb kotonaru is frequently used as a non-past indicative form, while matomeru is not frequently used as a non-past indicative form. (Recall that these two lemmas have similar token frequency according to our corpus-based research.) According to the listener-oriented approach, it is expected that the non-past indicative form kotonaru may be recognized more accurately and faster than the non-past indicative form matomeru.
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Acknowledgements
The earlier version of this study was presented at the 29th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (Nagoya University & the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics), the Socio meeting (University of Canterbury), and the Tokyo Circle of Phonologists. I thank the audiences for their comments at these events. I am especially grateful to Jen Hay, Donald Derrick, Ayaki Kujirai, Clemens Poppe, Shin-ichi Tanaka, Manami Hirayama, Marco Fonseca, Yusuke Kubota, and Dani Watson. I also thank the journal editor Sabine Arndt-Lappe for providing me with many insightful comments, and Clara Cohen for sharing her knowledge about paradigm predictability effects. I greatly appreciate the two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this study.
Funding
This study is supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grant number 20K13000 (https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-20K13000/).
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Daiki Hashimoto confirms sole responsibilities for conceptualization, scripting, data retrieval, data processing, statistical analyses, writing, and funding acquisition. As explained in Sect. 3, this study employs the CSJ corpus, and the corpus was constructed by the CSJ development team. I am permitted to use the corpus for academic research, but I am not allowed to share the data with someone outside my research institution. See the following link for how to obtain the permission to use the corpus data (https://clrd.ninjal.ac.jp/csj/en/index.html).
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Hashimoto, D. The effect of verbal conjugation predictability on speech signal. Morphology 33, 41–63 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09404-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09404-9