PLoS ONE (Jan 2021)

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

  • Matt Hunt Gardner,
  • Eva Uffing,
  • Nicholas Van Vaeck,
  • Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252602
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 16, no. 6
p. e0252602

Abstract

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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.