Contraction use as a measure of speaker choice in spontaneous speech
Overview
One useful source of data for testing psycholinguistic theories of utterance planning is the choices speakers make in spontaneous speech. Speakers will often be able to choose between multiple syntactic structures, lexical items to fill those frames, and pronunciations of those lexical items. The choices speakers make at each of these levels can reveal the strategies they're using and the priorities of the processing system.
This study investigates morpho-syntactic reduction, or contraction, in American English. This includes examples like
- I [am/'m] happy today
- You[have/'ve] been happy lately
- He was[not/n't] happy yesterday
Methods
We collect all instances of a reducible element from the Paraphrase corpus. From the surrounding context, we measure a number of linguistic and psychological factors known to influence language planning processes. We use logistic regression models with bootstrapping for speaker effects, and logit mixed models to test the influence of these factors on contraction use.
Studies
We have complete three studies to date, each representing a different reducible element:
HAVE
have/'ve
had/'d
has/'s
BE
am/'m
are/'re
is/'s
NOT
not/n't