Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310058, China.
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, California, 95064-1077, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2018 Aug;144(2):997. doi: 10.1121/1.5046095.
The probability is one of the many factors which influence phonetic variation. Contextual probability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production (the probabilistic reduction effect). In this paper the question of whether the probabilistic reduction effect, as previously observed for majority languages like English, is also found in a language (Kaqchikel Mayan) which has relatively rich morphology is explored. Specifically, whether the contextual predictability of words and morphemes influences their phonetic duration in Kaqchikel is examined. It is found that the contextual predictability of a word has a significant effect on its duration. The effect is manifested differently for lexical words and function words. It is also found that the contextual predictability of certain prefixes in Kaqchikel affects their duration, showing that contextual predictability may drive reduction effects at multiple levels of structure. While the findings are broadly consistent with many previous studies (primarily on English), some of the details of the results are different. These differences highlight the importance of examining the probabilistic reduction effect in languages beyond the majority, Indo-European languages most commonly investigated in experimental and corpus linguistics.
概率是影响语音变异的众多因素之一。语境概率描述了一个语言单位在某些局部环境中的可预测性，它一直被证明可以调节语音产生中单词和其他语言单位的语音显著性（概率缩减效应）。在本文中，我们探讨了概率缩减效应是否也存在于一种具有相对丰富形态的语言（卡克奇克尔玛雅语）中，而这种语言之前已经在英语等多数语言中观察到过。具体来说，就是词和语素的语境可预测性是否会影响它们在卡克奇克尔语中的语音持续时间。结果发现，词的语境可预测性对其持续时间有显著影响。这种影响在词汇词和功能词上表现不同。此外，还发现卡克奇克尔语中某些前缀的语境可预测性会影响它们的持续时间，这表明语境可预测性可能会在多个结构层次上驱动缩减效应。虽然这些发现与许多之前的研究（主要是关于英语的研究）大致一致，但结果的一些细节有所不同。这些差异突出了在实验和语料库语言学中最常研究的印欧语系以外的语言中检验概率缩减效应的重要性。
