Variation isn't that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gardner MH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8216537 | biostudies-literature | 2021
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Variation isn't that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty.
Gardner Matt Hunt MH Uffing Eva E Van Vaeck Nicholas N Szmrecsanyi Benedikt B
PloS one 20210621 6
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 effec ...[more]
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