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Linguitics Seminar - Branching and the acoustic signal: How duration informs about the internal structure of NNN compounds

This event will be taking place on Friday 29 May 2026 at 12:00-13:30 .

Speaker

Dr Annika Schebesta (Department of English Language, University of Siegen, Germany)

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the internal structure of morphologically complex words may affect the acoustic signal: For instance, the duration of segments (e.g., Sproat & Fujimura 1993, Lee-Kim et al. 2013, Plag et al. 2017) and affixes (e.g., Hay 2007, Smith et al. 2012, Ben Hedia & Plag 2017) varies depending on morphological status, and the presence or absence of morphological boundaries as well as the degree of boundary strength impact acoustic measurements, such as vowel quality and consonant articulation (e.g., Sproat & Fujimura 1993, Smith et al. 2012). At the same time, lexical frequency is a well-known determinant of acoustic duration in both morphologically simplex (e.g., Gahl 2008, Schuppler et al. 2012) and complex words (Arnon & Cohen Priva 2013).

While previous research prominently investigated affixed words, this paper will present findings from two studies of the acoustic signal of English NNN. There are generally two possible branching directions in NNN compounds, namely left-branching [N1N2] N3 (e.g., healthcare law) and right-branching N1 [N2N3] (e.g., corner drugstore). Branching direction is determined by a number of factors, such as morphological boundary strength, lexical bigram frequency (N1N2, N2N3) and a compound’s orthographic form. In their corpus study, Schebesta & Kunter (2022) find that the acoustic signal of N2 is particularly affected by an interaction of morphological structure and lexical bigram frequency: The acoustic duration of N2 constituents appears to be used to disambiguate branching direction whenever morphological structure and lexical bigram frequency suggest different branchings. To validate the corpus-based findings,
an experimental investigation was carried out. In this talk, I will present the findings from the experimental study and demonstrate how they align with the findings from Schebesta & Kunter (2022).

References

Arnon, I. and Cohen Priva, U. (2013). More than words: The effect of multi-word frequency and constituency on phonetic duration. Language and Speech, 56(3):349–371.

Ben Hedia, S. and Plag, I. (2017). Gemination and degemination in English prefixation: Phonetic evidence for morphological organization. Journal of Phonetics, 62:34–49.

Gahl, S. (2008). Time and thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language, 84(3):474–496.

Hay, J. (2007). The phonetics of `un 虂. In Munat, J., editor, Lexical creativity, texts and contexts, volume 58 of Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, pages 39–57. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam.

Lee-Kim, S.-I., Davidson, L., and Hwang, S. (2013). Morphological effects on the darkness of English intervocalic /l/. 4(2):475–511.

Plag, I., Homann, J., and Kunter, G. (2017). Homophony and morphology: The acoustics of word-final S in English. Journal of Linguistics, 53(1):181–216.

Schuppler, B., van Dommelen, W. A., Koreman, J., and Ernestus, M. (2012). How linguistic and probabilistic properties of a word affect the realization of its final /t/: Studies at the phonemic and sub-phonemic level. Journal of Phonetics, 40(4):595–607.

Smith, R., Baker, R., and Hawkins, S. (2012). Phonetic detail that distinguishes prefixed from pseudo-prefixed words. Journal of Phonetics, 40(5):689–705.

Sproat, R. and Fujimura, O. (1993). Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. Journal of Phonetics, 21:291–311.