The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English

Abstract: 

A number of factors influence the duration of words. Among these, syntactic structure and informativeness are two which, through their effects on the durational patterns of words, offer clues to speech production and the processes speakers engage in when varying word duration. In this talk, I will elaborate on the systematic differences between information computed online and that which is stored for later retrieval, and detail how the latter but not the former interacts with durational patterns of words in a way similar to syntactic structure. The presentation connects the predictions of large language models with those made by more traditional, surface-level features found in the linguistics literature and with the predictions of a classic algorithm for determining prominence from syntactic structure, and ultimately offers a more detailed picture of the relationship of syntax and information with the prosodic realization of utterances in spontaneous spoken English.