Acoustic disambiguation of homophonous morphs is exceptional

Abstract

Homophonous morphs have been reported to show differences in acoustic duration in languages such as English and German. How common these differences are across languages, and what factors influence the extent of temporal differences, is still an open question, however. This paper investigates the role of morphological disambiguation in predicting the acoustic duration of homophones using data from a diverse sample of 37 languages. Results indicate a low overall contribution of morphological affiliation compared to other well-studied effects on duration such as speech rate and Final Lengthening. It is proposed that two factors increase the importance of homophony avoidance for the acoustic shape of morphs: crowdedness (i.e. the number of competing homophones) and segmental make-up, in particular the presence of an alveolar fricative. These findings offer an empirically broad perspective on the interplay between morphology and phonetics and align with the view of language as an adaptive and efficient system.