The Phonetics of Word Class and its Representation in the Lexicon

最近的研究表明，许多传统上被认为是同音字的单词发音不同，但表现出系统性的语音差异。这一发现对已建立的语音表征和言语产生模型的标准假设提出了质疑。拟议的项目旨在通过分析在一个以上词类中使用的所谓同音字的声学实现，为这一新兴的研究方向做出贡献。更具体地说，目的是将名词实现与名词-动词同音的动词实现进行比较，例如利润或注意。由于这种名词-动词对在英语中非常常见，这个项目针对的是英语词汇的一个普遍特征。从以往的研究中可以看出，这些形式的名词和动词的发音是不同的，这是因为它们出现在不同的句子位置，导致名词更容易受到延长的影响。除了这种语境影响之外，有初步证据表明名词和动词实现之间存在进一步的差异；然而，这一点尚未得到系统的探索。这个项目的第一个目标是利用语料库和实验启发式的语音数据，对这些与语境无关的声学实现差异进行实证研究。该项目的第二个目标是测试语言使用者是否使用名词-动词同音字的语音细节作为词类的提示；这一假设将在知觉实验中得到验证。来自产出和感知任务的发现将有助于我们理解英语词汇中相当大一部分的语音细节的表征。

Recent research has shown that many words traditionally assumed to be homophones are not pronounced the same but exhibit systematic phonetic differences. This finding calls into question standard assumptions of established models of phonological representation and speech production. The proposed project aims at contributing to this emergent line of research by analyzing the acoustic realization of alleged homophones that have uses in more than one word class. More specifically, the aim is to compare the noun realization to the verb realization of noun-verb homophones, such as profit or notice. Since such noun-verb pairs are very frequent in English, this project targets a widespread characteristic of the English lexicon. From previous research it is known that the noun and verb pronunciation of these forms differ due to different sentence positions they occur in, resulting in nouns being more frequently subject to lengthening effects. Beyond this contextual influence, there is initial evidence of further variation between noun and verb realization; however, this has not been systematically explored yet. The first aim of this project is to empirically investigate these context-independent differences in acoustic realization, using speech data from corpora and from experimental elicitation. The second aim of the project is to test whether language users use phonetic detail of noun-verb homophones as a cue to word class; this assumption will be tested in perception experiments. The findings from both the production and the perception tasks will contribute to our understanding of the representation of phonetic detail for a substantial share of the English lexicon.