The duration of word-final /s/ differs across morphological categories in English: evidence from pseudowords.

Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic > plural > clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is- and has-clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production.

Durational Differences of Word-Final /s/ Emerge From the Lexicon: Modelling Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Pseudowords With Linear Discriminative Learning.

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.