Prosody leaks into the memories of words

The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend occur more predictable environments are shorter than less environments. One account the informativity effect on is acoustic details probabilistic reduction stored as part word's mental representation. Other research argued effects tied prosodic structure integral ways. With aim assessing potential basis for speech production, this study extends past work two directions; it investigated another large language, Mandarin Chinese, and broadened beyond additional dimensions, pitch intensity, known index prominence. information content was extracted from telephone conversation corpus with over 400,000 tokens 6000 types spoken by 1655 individuals analyzed using frequency statistics estimated 431 million subtitle corpus. Results indicated low have durations, replicating found English. In addition, had significant maximum phonetic dimensions related Extending interpretation, these results suggest closely linked prominence, lexical representation includes associated its prominence discourse. other words, lexicon absorbs influences production.