If the usage/omission of that is indeed a result of the sensitivity of language producers to information density, we may assume the same principle to govern syntactic choices at earlier stages of the development of the English language. The language production should, too, be optimized in order to avoid spikes in processing difficulty.
In my project, I test in how far this assumption is reflected in the data of Early Modern period on the basis of reconstructed speech from the Corpus of Early English Dialogues 1560–1760. I explore whether the syntactic variation can be explained solely by the processing constraints, or whether other factors play a role. The examined factors include the length and position of the complement clause, ambiguity at the onset of the complement clause, subject type, as well as the year in which the speech was first published (in order to explore the small-scale diachronic development of the phenomenon).
]]>The presentation will focus on the HKE speakers’ convergence on two vowels (THOUGHT and PATH vowel) and three consonants (rhoticity, fricative /z/ and fricative /θ/) in the two exposure conditions. The effect of language attitudes in convergence will be reported too. Exemplar-based theories are adopted to explain convergence; however, the accounts do not seem to explain the divergence found in the present study.
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However, what parts of the signal listeners use to anticipate speaker intentions and how they adapt their anticipatory behavior in light of experiences is not well understood yet. This talk presents mouse tracking data that explore these open questions. I will present evidence that (i) listeners can use both the presence of salient pitch events and the absence of otherwise expected pitch events to predict upcoming referential intentions; (ii) some parts of the prosodic signal are systematically ignored when making predictions; and (iii) listeners dynamically adapt their predictive behavior in light of accumulating evidence.
It is argued that listeners rapidly integrate bottom-up acoustic information and weigh it against their top-down expectations about likely prosodic patterns. Moreover, listeners are rational when they evaluate the reliability, that is the usefulness, of parts of the signal to predict what the speaker intends to communicate.
]]>This talk examines the predictions of two uniformity constraints that require similar (or uniform) phonetic realization of distinctive features across members of a natural class. To evaluate the predictions, I present data on the realization of sibilant fricatives across talkers of American English and Czech. The findings support the hypothesis that talker variation is highly constrained, and also have important implications for rapid perceptual adaptation to novel talkers.
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