Effects of stress and lexical structure on speech efficiency

It is proposed that some of the variation in speech is the result of an effort to communicate efficiently. Speaking is considered efficient if the speech sound contains only the information needed to understand it. This efficiency is tested by means of a corpus of spontaneous and matched read speech, and syllable, word, and N-gram frequencies as measures of information content (1582 intervocalic consonants, and 2540 vowels). It is indeed found that the duration and spectral reduction of consonants and vowels from stressed syllables correlate with syllable and word frequencies, as does consonant intelligibility. Correlations for phonemes from unstressed syllables are generally weaker or absent. N-gram models of word predictability did not correlate with any of the factors investigated. Simple N-grams seem to be a poor model for human word prediction. It is concluded that the principle of efficient communication organizes at least some aspects of speech production.

[1]  L P Shapiro,et al.  "How to milk a coat:" the effects of semantic and acoustic information on phoneme categorization. , 1998, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[2]  Sharon Hunnicutt,et al.  Intelligibility Versus Redundancy - Conditions of Dependency , 1985 .

[3]  Hyeon-Seok Kang,et al.  Acoustic and Intonational Correlates of the Informational Status of Referring Expressions in Seoul Korean , 1996 .

[4]  Anne Cutler.  Speaking for listening , 1987 .

[5]  V.W. Zue,et al.  The use of speech knowledge in automatic speech recognition , 1985, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[6]  B. Lindblom,et al.  Role of articulation in speech perception: clues from production. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  V. V. van Heuven,et al.  Spectral balance as a cue in the perception of linguistic stress. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[8]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Spoken word recognition and production , 1995 .

[9]  Agaath M. C. Sluijter,et al.  Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  Florien J. van Beinum,et al.  Efficiency as an organizing principle of natural speech , 1998, ICSLP.

[11]  Louis C. W. Pols,et al.  An acoustic description of consonant reduction , 1999, Speech Commun..

[12]  J. Charles-Luce,et al.  Cognitive Factors Involved in Preserving a Phonemic Contrast , 1997, Language and speech.

[13]  P. Lieberman.  Some Effects of Semantic and Grammatical Context on the Production and Perception of Speech , 1963 .

[14]  D. Kemmerer,et al.  Phonotactics and Syllable Stress: Implications for the Processing of Spoken Nonsense Words , 1997, Language and speech.

[15]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Speech, language, and communication , 1997 .