Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore whether de-lexicalized syntactic information impactsthe phonetic duration of nouns. The motivating expectation is thatnouns that carry more syntactic information will be more difficultto produce in situ, leading to longer durations. We approach thisquestion from two perspectives: pure diversity of a noun'sdistribution across its available syntactic relations, and distance ofthis distribution from the average distribution of nouns in thelanguage at large. The former measure is designed to capture theinterconnectivity between the lexical and syntactic tiers oflinguistic representation. The latter measure targets how well anindividual noun fits the behavior expected for the noun class. Wefind that durations are sensitive to both measures incomplementary fashion: nouns with more diverse syntacticdistributions are produced with longer durations, and nouns thathave distinctive (non-prototypical) distributions have shorterdurations.