Contextual predictability influences word and morpheme duration in Kaqchikel

What is it about?

Probability is one of the many factors which influence phonetic variation. Contextual probability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production. We examined whether the probabilistic reduction effect, as previously observed for majority languages like English, is also found in a language (Kaqchikel Mayan) which has relatively rich morphology. We have shown that the contextual predictability of words and morphemes influences their phonetic duration in Kaqchikel. The effect is manifested differently for lexical words and function words.

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Why is it important?

Firstly, not many studies have examined both word and morpheme reductions in a morphologically rich language, thus our work is an important contribution in this respect. While our findings on the probabilistic reduction effect are broadly consistent with many previous studies (primarily on English), some of the details of our results are different (especially with lexical words vs. function words). These differences highlight the importance of examining the probabilistic reduction effect in languages beyond the majority, Indo-European languages most commonly investigated in experimental and corpus linguistics.