Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gardner, Matt Hunt
• Uffing, Eva
• Van Vaeck, Nicholas
• Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
• Gries, Stefan Th

Titel

Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

Ist Teil von

• PloS one, 2021-06, Vol.16 (6), p.e0252602-e0252602

Ort / Verlag

San Francisco: Public Library of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The following paper explores the link between production difficulty and grammatical variability. Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (um and uh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). When 20 morphosyntactic variables are considered collectively (N= 6,268), there is no positive effect. In other words, variable contexts do not correlate with measurable production difficulties. These results challenge the view that grammatical variability is somehow sub-optimal for speakers, with additional burdensome cognitive planning.