Modeling durational incompressibility

We show how incompressibility, a well-described property of some prosodic timing effects, can be accounted for in an optimization-based model of speech timing. Preliminary results of a corpus study are presented, replicating and generalizing previous findings on incompressibility as a function of increasing speaking rate. We then introduce the architecture of our model and present results of simulation experiments that reproduce the results of the corpus analysis. Results suggest that incompressibility can be interpreted as a consequence of tradeoffs between competing requirements of production efficiency and communicative efficacy.