This paper is concerned with phonetic correlates of grammatical category, specifically the finding that nouns are pronounced with greater duration than verbs in discourse. Most previous research has attributed this difference to the sentence positions that the two grammatical categories occupy and concomitant prosodic effects. Based on previous findings, we test two further effects, namely a category-specific effect on prosodic phrasing, which leads to stronger prosodic boundaries after nouns than verbs even in maximally similar syntactic contexts, and a reductive effect of lexical frequency leading to shorter durations of the more frequent word. These effects are tested in a production study investigating durational differences of twelve noun–verb homophone pairs in English in two clause-medial contexts. We find evidence for both effects: prosodic boundaries are stronger after nouns than verbs across all conditions, resulting in greater durations of nouns due to pre-boundary lengthening. Furthermore, differences in frequency result in a reduced duration of the homophone of the pair which has the greater frequency. We propose an explanation in which phonetic effects of grammatical category are caused by the interplay of sentence prosody, category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency.

本文关注的是语法类别的语音相关性，特别是在话语中名词的发音持续时间长于动词的发现。以前的大多数研究已将此差异归因于两个语法类别所占据的句子位置以及伴随的韵律效果。根据先前的发现，我们测试了两个进一步的影响，即对韵律短语的类别特定影响，即使在最大相似的句法语境中，其导致名词后的韵律边界比动词更强，以及词汇频率的归因影响导致较短的句法持续时间。更频繁的词。这些效果在一项生产研究中得到了检验，该研究调查了在两种从句中间的情况下，英语中十二个名词-动词同形异义词对的持续时间差异。我们找到两种效果的证据：在所有情况下，名词之后的韵律边界要比动词更强，由于边界前加长，名词的持续时间更长。此外，频率上的差异导致频率较高的一对同音电话的持续时间缩短。我们提出一种解释，其中语法类别的语音效果是由句子韵律，类别特定的韵律短语和词汇频率的相互作用引起的。