Information density and the predictability of phonetic structure
Keywords:
surprisal, formants, Lombard effect, voicing, L2Abstract
The study investigates the relation between information density and linguistic encoding in phonetics and human speech processing. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit’s negative log probability in a given context). The effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding have been examined with respect to various aspects such as the formant trajectories of vowels, the voicing of plosives, syllable duration, and vowel dispersion (also in L2), considering control factors of prosodic structure and potential interactions with the Lombard effect and the prosodic structure. The results suggest that speakers adjust phonetic details to maintain a balance between information density and phonetic encoding.
References
Andreeva, Bistra / Barry, William J. / Koreman, Jacques. 2013. „The Bulgarian stressed and unstressed vowel system. A corpus study.“ In Proceedings of Interspeech 2013 (345–348). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2013-97
Andreeva, Bistra / Möbius, Bernd / Whang, James. 2020. „Effects of surprisal and boundary strength on phrase-final lengthening.“ In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020 (146–150). http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-30
Aylett, Matthew / Turk, Alice. 2004. „The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis: A functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech.“ Language and Speech 47: 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309040470010201
Aylett, Matthew / Turk, Alice. 2006. „Language redundancy predicts syllabic duration and the spectral characteristics of vocalic syllable nuclei.“ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (1): 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2188331
Baker, Rachel A. / Bradlow, Anna R. 2009. „Variability in word duration as a function of probability, speech style, and prosody.“ Language and Speech 52 (4): 391–413. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830909336575
Baroni, Marco / Bernardini, Silvia / Ferraresi, Adriano / Zanchetta, Eros. 2009. „The WaCky Wide Web: a collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora.“ Language Resources and Evaluation 43: 209–226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9081-4
Björklund, Anders / Eckart, Kerstin / Riester, Arndt / Schauffler, Nadja / Schweitzer, Katrin. 2014. „The extended DIRNDL corpus as a resource for automatic coreference and bridging resolution.“ In Proceedings of LREC (3222–3228). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/891_Paper.pdf [Zugriff am 28.02.2025].
Brandt, Erika / Andreeva, Bistra / Möbius, Bernd. 2019. „Information density and vowel dispersion in the productions of Bulgarian L2 speakers of German.“ In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (3165–3169). https://assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_3214.pdf [Zugriff am 28.02.2025].
Brandt, Erika / Möbius, Bernd / Andreeva, Bistra. 2021. „Dynamic formant trajectories in German read speech: Impact of predictability and prominence.“ Frontiers in Communication / Language Sciences 6: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.643528
Chan, Dominic / Fourcin, Adrian / Gibbon, Dafydd / et al. 1995. „EUROM- A Spoken Language Resource for the EU.“ In Eurospeech’95. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Speech Communication and Speech Technology. Madrid, Spain, Vol 1 (867–870).
Cooke, Martin / King, Simon / Garnier, Maëva / Aubanel, Vincent. 2014. „The listening talker: a review of human and algorithmic context-induced modifications of speech.“ Computer Speech and Language 28 (2): 543–571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2013.08.003
Eckart, Kerstin / Riester, Arndt / Schweitzer, Katrin. 2012. „A discourse information radio news database for linguistic analysis.“ In Linked data in linguistics: Representing and connecting language data and language metadata (65–75), hrsg. von C. Chiarcos et al. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Gahl, Susanne / Yao, Yao / Johnson, Keith. 2012. „Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech.“ Journal of Memory and Language 66 (4): 789–806.
Hale, John. 2016. „Information-theoretical complexity metrics.“ Language and Linguistics Compass 10 (9): 397–412. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12196
Ibrahim, Omnia / Yuen, Ivan / Andreeva, Bistra / Möbius, Bernd. 2022a. „The effect of predictability on German stop voicing is phonologically selective.“ In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022 (669–673). https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-136
Ibrahim, Omnia / Yuen, Ivan / van Os, Marjolein / Andreeva, Bistra / Möbius, Bernd. 2022b. „The combined effects of contextual predictability and noise on the acoustic realisation of German syllables.“ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 152 (2): 911–920. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0013413
Junqua, Jean-Claude. 1996. „The influence of acoustics on speech production: A noise-induced stress phenomenon known as the lombard reflex.“ Speech Communication 20 (1): 13–22.
Levy, Roger / Jaeger, T. Florian. 2006. „Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction.“ In Advances in neural information processing systems 19 (849–856), hrsg. von B. Schölkopf et al. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7503.003.0111
Malisz, Zofia / Brandt, Erika / Möbius, Bernd / Oh, Yoon Mi / Andreeva, Bistra. 2018. „Dimensions of segmental variability: interaction of prosody and surprisal in six languages.“ Frontiers in Communication / Language Sciences 3: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025
Mayer, Jörg. 1995. Transcription of German intonation – the Stuttgart system. Tech. rep. Institute of Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart.
Möhler, Gregor / Schweitzer, Antje / Breitenbücher, Mark / Barbisch, Martin. 2000. IMS German Festival (version 1.2-os). University of Stuttgart: Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS). [Zugriff am 02.01.2020].
Sabev, Mitko / Andreeva, Bistra. 2024. „The acoustics of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian vowels: A corpus study.“ The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 155 (3): 2128–2138.
Shannon, Claude Elwood. 1948. „A Mathematical Theory of Communication.“ Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379–423.
Schiel, Florian. 1997. Siemens Synthesis Corpus – SI1000P. University of Munich.
Stolcke, Andreas. 2002. „SRILM — an extensible language modeling toolkit.“ In Proceedings of Interspeech 2002 (901–904). https://www.isca-archive.org/icslp_2002/stolcke02_icslp.html [Zugriff am 28.02.2025].
Turk, Alice. 2010. „Does prosodic constituency signal relative predictability? A Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis.“ Laboratory Phonology 1: 227–262. https://doi.org/10.1515/LABPHON.2010.012
Witten, Ian H. / Bell, Timothy C. 1991. „The zero-frequency problem: Estimating the probabilities of novel events in adaptive text compression.“ IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 37 (4): 1085–1094.
