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

Matt Hunt Gardner; Eva Uffing; Nicholas Van Vaeck; Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0252602

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

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 21;16(6):e0252602. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252602. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Matt Hunt Gardner¹, Eva Uffing¹, Nicholas Van Vaeck¹, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Linguistics, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Aged
Educational Status
Female
Humans
Language
Male
Middle Aged
Speech*
Young Adult

Grants and funding

BS:Grant# G.0C59.13N; Research Foundation Flanders (FWO); https://www.fwo.be/en/; The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.