AUTHOR=Schmitz Dominic , Plag Ingo , Baer-Henney Dinah , Stein Simon David TITLE=Durational Differences of Word-Final /s/ Emerge From the Lexicon: Modelling Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Pseudowords With Linear Discriminative Learning JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=12 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.680889 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.680889 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Recent research has shown that seemingly identical suffixes such as word-final /s/ in English show systematic differences in their phonetic realisations. Most recently, durational differences between different types of /s/ have been found to also hold for pseudowords: the duration of /s/ is longest in non-morphemic contexts, shorter with suffixes, and shortest in clitics. At the theoretical level such systematic differences are unexpected and unaccounted for in current theories of speech production. Following a recent approach, we implemented a linear discriminative learning network trained on real word data in order to predict the duration of word-final non-morphemic and plural /s/ in pseudowords using production data by a previous production study. It is demonstrated that the duration of word-final /s/ in pseudowords can be predicted by LDL networks trained on real word data. That is, duration of word-final /s/ in pseudowords can be predicted based on their relations to the lexicon.