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This article reports the results of an auditory lexical decision task, testing the processing of phonetic detail of English noun/verb conversion pairs. The article builds on recent findings showing that the frequent occurrence in certain prosodic environments may lead to the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail as part of the lexical representation. To investigate this question with noun/verb conversion pairs, ambicategorical stimuli were used that exhibit systematic occurrence differences with regard to prosodic environment, as indicated by either a strong verb-bias, e.g., talk (N/V) or a strong noun-bias, e.g., voice (N/V). The auditory lexical decision task tests whether acoustic properties reflecting either the typical or the atypical prosodic environment impact the processing of recordings of the stimuli. In doing so assumptions about the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail are tested that distinguish competing model architectures. The results are most straightforwardly accounted for within an abstractionist architecture, in which the acoustic signal is mapped onto a representation that is based on the canonical pronunciation of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades a considerable number of works have observed differences in the phonetic realization of nouns and verbs. The guiding question in most relevant research is whether such differences are caused by grammatical category per se, or are triggered by more general processes of phonetic implementation that impact nouns and verbs differently. Most studies argue for the latter and focus on one particular process or variable, which is advocated to be responsible for the acoustic differences observed. Among the processes mentioned are pre-boundary lengthening, accentuation, and frequency-induced reduction. Due to the focus on monofactorial explanations, an overview and contextualization of the different processes interacting with the noun-verb distinction is yet missing. The present paper aims to fill this gap. This goal is pursed by providing an in-depth discussion of how grammatical category interacts with a number of different processes that affect acoustic realization. To that end results from the literature on the topic are synthesized with new acoustic analyses of noun-verb homophones from spontaneous speech. The analysis shows that differences in acoustic realization between nouns and verbs are caused by the complex interplay of a number of different processes, defying simple, monofactorial explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nouns are followed by prosodic boundaries of greater strength than verbs. • Category-specific boundary strength co-determines durational differences between nouns and verbs. • Category-specific (lemma) frequency impacts the duration of noun–verb homophones. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]