Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech
Recent evidence has indicated that a word's morphological family and inflectional paradigm members get activated when we produce words. These paradigmatic effects have previously been studied in careful, laboratory context using words in isolation. This previous research has not investigated how the linguistic context affects spontaneous speech production. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following related work on English, we focus on morphemic and non-morphemic word final /-s/ in content words. We report that linguistic context, as measured by conditional probability, has the strongest effect on the acoustic durations, while inflectional properties (internal structure and inflectional paradigm size) also affect word and segment durations. These results indicate that morphology is part of a complex system that interacts with other aspects of the language production system.