Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech.

This article investigates how paradigmatic (word-external morphological family) and syntagmatic (contextual) factors influence the phonetic duration of words and word-final /-s/ segments in spontaneous Estonian speech, a language with complex morphology. Using a corpus of spontaneous conversations, the study finds that smaller realized inflectional paradigm size—reflecting the number of actively used inflected forms of a word—is associated with longer durations of both words and final /-s/ segments, supporting the paradigmatic enhancement hypothesis. Additionally, higher conditional probability of a word given its following context correlates with shorter durations, with an interaction showing that this effect on /-s/ duration occurs only for inflected forms. Unlike findings in English, the inflectional function of /-s/ alone does not significantly affect duration in Estonian. These results suggest that in Estonian speech production, usage-based morphological family size and contextual predictability independently shape phonetic realization, highlighting the importance of language-specific morphological complexity in models of speech production.