Introduction General Questions: What is the main cause of language change?

1. Keeping track of what’s new: Phonological shortening in Thai Prakaiwan Vajrabhaya and Vsevolod KapatsinskiDepartment of Linguistics 1290 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 USA • Introduction • General Questions: • What is the main cause of language change? • Is it due to human laziness, the drive to conserve energy? Is it an automatization of repeated articulatory sequences (Bybee 2002, Polivanov 1939). • Do people speak to be heard in order to be understood? Do speakers take into consideration the availability of information the listener possesses? (Lindblom 1990; Chafe 1976) . • Previous findings: • Words repeated within a conversation are phonologically reduced (Anderson & Howarth, 2002; Bell et al., 2009; Fowler, 1988; Fowler & Housum, 1987; Pluymaekers et al., 2005). • Speakers are sensitive to whether the word is new to the listener (Galati and Brennan 2010, though see Bard et al. 2000) • The literature in this area has been conducted on Germanic languages (English and Dutch). • Objectives of this study: • To discover whether phonological shortening in subsequent mentions occurs in Thai • If phonological shortening occurs in Thai, then is the reduction listener-based or speaker-based? Do speakers use reduction to signal givenness? Is givenness about types of tokens? • Each speaker tells two stories in the sequence of: • Listener 1-- Story 1, Listener 1 -- Story 2 • Listener 2 -- Story 1, Listener 2 – Story 2 • An example of the stimuli • Linear mixed effects model (for utterance-medial tokens) • Variables: • Mention within story (first or subsequent) • Story (1 vs. 2) • Listener (1 vs. 2) • Speech rate before the target word (time / # of syllables since the beginning of the utterance) • Speech rate after the target word (time / # of syllables until the end of the utterance) • Number of syllables before • Number of syllables after • Speaker • Target word • Best model • log(wordDuration) ~ (0+Story|Speaker) + (1|Word) + (0+Mention|Word) + Listener • Random intercepts for specific words: some words are longer than others • Second mentions within a story are shorter (t=6.61, p<.0001): • The effect of mention varies across words; some words reduce more than others from first to second mention • The effect of story (1 vs. 2) varies across speakers: one of the speakers does not ‘restart’ reduction when she starts a new story • Effect of listener (1 vs. 2): when a story is told for the second time to a new listener, the words within the story are shorter (t=2.17, p=.03); accounts for 2% of variance • Reduction within stories is stronger than across stories: • Mention – 14% of variance • Listener – 2% of variance • No effect of story when speakers tell the second story to an old listener. Word length is similar to when they were used in the first story • Fig 2. The magnitudes of effects of repetition within a story (‘mention’), repetition across the two tellings of a story (‘listener’), and repetition across stories within a listener (‘story’) • Conclusions and future work • Conclusions: • Reduction occurs in subsequent mentions within the same narrative and, to a lesser extent, across narratives. The reduction is not a result of speech rate effect. • A change in story and object management appears to disrupt reduction as much as a change in listener, even though all words have been mentioned; the objects only appear in new positions. • Future work: • More subjects needed. Why do some speakers reduce more than others across stories? • Why are some words more prone to reduction ? • What causes the resetting of duration when speakers start a new story? • Is givenness token-based or is it bounded to a narrative? Figure 4. Lall the lines (as above) and then delete the silly key provided by your charting software altogether. The above figure would also be greatly improved if I had the ability to draw mini rats with and without brains. I would then put these really cute little illustrations next to the lines they represent. Be sure to separate figures from other figures by generous use of white space. When figures are too cramped, viewers get confused about which figures to read first and which legend goes with which figure. Figures are preferred but tables are sometimes unavoidable. A table looks best when it is first composed within Microsoft Word, then “Inserted” as an “Object.” If you can add small drawings or icons to your tables, do so! References Anderson, A.H. & Howarth, B. (2002). Referential form and word duration in video –mediated and face-to-face dialogues. In J. Bos, M.E. Foster, & C. Matheson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (EDILOG 2002). Edinburgh: Cognitive Science Centre, University of Edinburgh. Bard, E.C., Anderson, A.H., Sotillo, C., Aylett, M., Doherty-Sneddon, G., & Newlands, A. (2000). Controlling the intelligibility of referring expressions in dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 1-22. Bell, A., Brenier, J. M., Gregory, M., Girand, C., & Jurafsky, D. (2009). Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 92-111. Bybee, J. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation and Change, 14, 261-290. Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C.N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic. New York: Academic Press. Fowler, C. (1988). Differential shortening of repeated content words produced in various communicative contexts. Language and Speech, 31, 307-319. Fowler, C. & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers’ signaling of “new” and “old” words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 489-504. Galati, A., & Brennan, S.E. (2010). Attenuating information in spoken communication: For the speaker or for the addressee? Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 35-61. Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory. In W. Hardcastle & A. Marchal (Eds.), Speech production and speech modeling. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R.H. (2005). Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy. Phonetica, 62, 146-159. • Results • Speakers of Thai reduce in subsequent mentions within a story (notches are 95% confidence intervals). • Duration is ‘reset’ at the beginning of a new narrative, not necessarily when a new listener is present. • Fig 1. Listener vs. Story Hi. If you’ve found this poster helpful, please consider sending me a postcard from wherever you are presenting your poster. It makes me feel like a have friends. Colin Purrington, Dept of Biology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Thai Student Association at University of Oregon for their time and their willingness to participate in the study. We also would like to thank Dr. Susan Guion-Anderson for her valuable advice. Put a figure here that explores one particular outcome in a complicated table of results. • Design • Three native speakers of Standard/Central Thai • A story- telling task that requires the speakers to describe the location of ten animal photos arranged on a cardboard to the listeners. The listeners are instructed to re-arrange their animal photos according to the speaker’s description. The speakers are able to see the listeners’ animal photos, but the listeners are not able to see the speakers’ animal photos. • All target words are monosyllabic This is the gene of interest! Figure 5. You can use connector lines and arrows to visually guide viewers through your results. Adding emphasis this way is much, much better than making the point with words in the text section. These lines can help viewers read your poster even when you’re not present. For further information Please contact pvajrabh@uoregon.edu or vkapatsi@uoregon.edu for more information on the project.