The

interplay between lexico-syntactic information and prosodic structures

Nicholas A. Lester & Argyro Katsika
University of Zürich University of California, Santa Barbara

Background Methods Results

➤ The temporal profile of words is controlled by
both phrasal and lexical factors
Data annotation Computing the syntactic measures Binomial Generalized Additive Mixed Models
Data were annotated for a number of variables known ➤ Diversity = Conditional Entropy H(D|L) ➤ Predicting position within intonation unit*
to interact with prosody., as well as further controls - initial vs. medial
− Phrase-initial and final positions present - medial vs. final
longer durations (e.g., Fletcher 2010) and our variable of interest: position within IU *p-values corrected for
- initial vs. final multiple comparison

− The overall syntactic distributions of lexical Dependent variable Medial vs. final
items impact their production times: the ➤ position within IU (initial, medial, or final) eDF refDF c2 p pB-Y
Component 1 1 1 0.044 .833 1
more prototypical or more diverse, the
➤ Typicality = Jensen-Shannon Divergence
Component 2 1 1 0.49 .484 1
Component 3 1 1 0.28 .597 1
longer (Lester et al. 2018) Control variables Let T be the frequency distribution of a given Component 4 1 1 23.676 <.001 <.001
Component 5 1 1 1.573 .210 1
➤ number of phonemes noun and P be the summed frequency Component 6 1.735 2.005 1.248 .538 1
Component 7 1.943 2.161 8.822 .020 .376

Research Question ➤ determiner type (a, an, the) distributions of all nouns: Component 8 1 1 0.007 .935 1
Component 9 1 1 0.464 .496 1
➤ average segmental bigram probability 2-gram surprisal 2.818 3.442 3.077 .444 1
➤ average positional segmental probability Speaker
Lemma
52.132
63.128
157
137
101.986
172.81
<.001
0
<.001
0
➤ Does the amount of overall syntactic ➤ phonological density (PLD20)
information carried by nouns affect their ➤ log lemma subtitle frequency Initial vs. final
placement within prosodic frames? ➤ bigram surprisal of DET + N sequence eDF refDF c2 p pB-Y
➤ inflectional entropy (singular vs. plural) Component 1 1.000 1.000 2.552 .11 1
initial medial final Component 2 1.908 2.244 5.704 .089 1
➤ lexical-contextual (semantic) entropy Decorrelation of predictors Component 3
Component 4
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.008
16.613
.929
<.001
1
.001

IU The variables listed above (control and critical) Component 5 2.022 2.260 3.222 .274 1
Critical variables were highly collinear (𝛋 > 44)
Component 6 1.000 1.000 0.378 .539 1
Component 7 1.302 1.424 3.694 .153 1
We further include two measures of the lexico- Component 8 1.000 1.000 0.204 .651 1
lexico-syntactic information? syntactic information carried by words: syntactic We center (z-score) the variables, then
Component 9 1.000 1.000 1.563 .211 1
2-gram surprisal 1.947 2.372 1.101 .632 1
diversity and typicality decorrelate the centered versions using Speaker 44.474 145.000 85.151 <.001 <.001
Lemma 47.083 132.000 99.248 0 <.001
Independent Component Analysis (9
Data ➤ Parse the British National Corpus using the spaCy
dependency parser (Honnibal & Johnson, 2015)
components)
Discussion
Three components concern our critical variables:
➤ Data taken from the Santa Barbara Corpus of ➤ Track all dependencies that touch our target nouns
Spoken American English (SBCAE; Du Bois et ➤ Lexico-syntactic information correlates with the position
(lemmas) in noun-specific frequency vectors:
al., 2005-) of nouns in the IU
➤ Final position strongly disprefers syntactic diversity
➤ Utterances were hand segmented into ➤ Perhaps more predictable syntax is preferred at prosodic
intonation units (IUs) based on a number of dep 1 dep 2 D dep1 dep2
boundaries?
prosodic cues (e.g., Du Bois, et al., 1992) ➤ Or perhaps the lengthening effects of syntactic
NOUN f(noun, dep1) f(noun, dep2)
information (Lester et al., 2018) compete with IU-level
lexA lexB lengthening, and so avoid being washed out by surfacing
➤ Each word was time-aligned to original
recordings using the Montreal Forced Aligner where they are most prosodically informative?
L lex A lex B

References
(McAuliffe et al., 2017) NOUN f(noun, lexA) f(noun, lexB)

➤ All noun phrases of the form [a(n)/the + N] Du Bois, J. W., Cumming, S., Schuetze-Coburn, S., & Paulano, S. (1992). Discourse transcription. Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, 4, 100-115. Department

were automatically extracted L , D dep 1, lex A dep 2, lex B

of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Du Bois, J. W., Chafe, W. L., Meyer, C., Thompson, S. A., Englebretson, R., & Martey, N. (2000-2005). Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts
1-4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Fletcher, J. (2010). The Prosody of Speech: Timing and Rhythm. In The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 523–602. United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell
NOUN f(noun, dep1, lexA) f(noun, dep2, lexB) Publishing.

➤ Only monosyllabic nouns were considered Honnibal, M. & Johnson, M. (2015). An improved non- monotonic transition system for dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1373-1378. Lisbon, Association for Computational Linguistics.
Lester, N. A., Baum, D., & Biron, T. (2018). Phonetic duration of nouns depends on de-lexicalized syntactic distributions: Evidence from naturally occurring
further conversation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 2035-2040.
McAuliffe, M., Socolof, M., Mihuc, S., Wagner, M., and Sonderegger, M. (2017). Montreal Forced Aligner: trainable text-speech alignment using Kaldi. In
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