Frequency of use leads to automaticity of production: Evidence from conversation

Abstract: Investigation of spontaneous replacement repairs found in the Switchboard Corpus (Godfrey et al., 1992) shows that low-frequency repaired words are more likely to be interrupted prior to replacement than high-frequency words are. These results provide novel empirical support to the hypothesis that the production of high-frequency words is more automatic than the production of low-frequency words (Bybee, 2002; Logan, 1982). The relationship between the effects of frequency on interruptibility is argued to be partially mediated by the effect of frequency on duration. In addition to testing the link between frequency and automaticity, the present paper reports that replaced words tend to be more frequent than the words that replace them, providing support for the hypothesis that high-frequency words are easier to access in word production, which has been criticized on the basis of not observing this frequency asymmetry in semantic substitution errors (Garrett, 2001). Finally, whether a word is interrupted is found to depend strongly on the length of the word, with long to-be-replaced words being more likely to be interrupted than produced completely. Thus, while speakers prefer to produce constituents with a continuous delivery (Clark &amp