Ефектът на лексикалната честотност върху регресивната асимилацията на обструентите по признака звучност
The Effects of Lexical Frequency and Morpheme Type on Anticipatory Voice Assimilation in Bulgarian Obstruents

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates the relationship between the frequency (or predictability) of linguistic units and the anticipatory voice assimilation of obstruents in Bulgarian. Using a speech corpus and word-level language models, we calculate the surprisal of word forms ending in the consonants /t/, /ʃ/, and /x/ in inflectional and lexical morphemes. We then employ a linear mixed model (LMM) to analyse how surprisal, the voicing of the following obstruent, and morpheme type affect the voicing realised in the examined consonants. The findings demonstrate that linguistic predictability affects articulatory precision by modulating the degree of anticipatory assimilation, with different effect sizes for different morpheme types. More specifically, obstruents in less predictable words are articulated with greater precision than those in more predictable words, especially within lexical morphemes. This reveals a complex interaction between information density, morphology and articulation, providing avenues for further research in phonetics and phonology.

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