Predictability affects vowel dispersion and dynamics in the Buckeye Corpus

Research on vowel space dispersion has found that vowel spaces are less dispersed when lexical and contextual factors favor identification of a word (e. g., a highly predictable word), and vowel spaces are more dispersed when lexical and contextual factors create an environment for less predictability [1, 2]. Examining sound changes in progress, recent work has demonstrated that, for some vowel changes, a vowel will be produced in a more innovative way when the lexical item in which it occurs is highly semantically predictable [3]. The data for such claims have been collected in laboratory settings. In this paper we investigate whether these findings from the laboratory extend into more naturalistic settings, and we examine the precise character of the reduction by examining dynamic movement across a vowel’s duration.