Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech

Recent evidence indicates that a word’s paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, thesefindings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thusignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present inspontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effectsin Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflectedand uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words.Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size,such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higherconditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, wedo not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final/-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discussthe results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologicallycomplex words and their paradigmatic neighbors.