Effects of lexical frequency and lexical category on the duration of Vietnamese syllables

Our study looks at the effect of lexical frequency, lexical categories and phrase boundaries on syllable duration in Vietnamese. We use durational data to shed light on the status of some ambiguous lexical categories such as kinship terms and positional nouns, and to gather additional evidence on the behaviour of some verbs that have grammaticalized homophones. Our results show that high frequency words tend to be shorter, that function words are independently shorter than lexical words, and that Vietnamese has pre-boundary lengthening. They also suggest that, in terms of duration, positional nouns pattern with lexical words, and that pronouns derived from kinship terms and grammaticalized verbs are not durationally distinct from their non-grammaticalized counterparts.