Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech

Speakers frequently have a choice among multiple ways of expressing one and the same thought. When choosing between syntactic constructions for expressing a given meaning, speakers are sensitive to probabilistic tendencies for syntactic, semantic or contextual properties of an utterance to favor one construction or another. Taken together, such tendencies may align to make one construction overwhelmingly more probable, marginally more probable, or no more probable than another. Here, we present evidence that acoustic features of spontaneous speech reflect these probabilities: when speakers choose a less probable construction, they are more likely to be disfluent, and their fluent words are likely to have a relatively longer duration. Conversely, words in more probable constructions are shorter and spoken more fluently. Our findings suggest that the di¤ering probabilities of a syntactic construction in context are not epiphenomenal, but reflect a part of a speakers’ knowledge of their language.