Acoustic differences in morphologically-distinct homophones

Previous work demonstrates that a word's status as morphologically-simple or complex may be reflected in its phonetic realisation. One possible source for these effects is phonetic paradigm uniformity, in which an intended word's phonetic realisation is influenced by its morphological relatives. For example, the realisation of the inflected word <i>frees</i> should be influenced by the phonological plan for <i>free</i>, and thus be non-homophonous with the morphologically-simple word <i>freeze</i>. We test this prediction by analysing productions of forty such inflected/simple word pairs, embedded in pseudo-conversational speech structured to avoid metalinguistic task effects, and balanced for frequency, orthography, as well as segmental and prosodic context. We find that stem and suffix durations are significantly longer by about 4–7% in fricative-final inflected words (<i>frees</i>, <i>laps</i>) compared to their simple counterparts (<i>freeze</i>, <i>lapse</i>), while we find a null effect for stop-final words. The result suggests that wordforms influence production of their relatives.