Sound and meaning: On the duration of Japanese homophones

It is by now well known that the relation between sound and meaning is much less arbitrary than in the original conception of de Saussure. Yet, whether meaning can directly influence the phonetics of a word, and thus create morphological variation is contentious. In this paper, we will investigate the duration of Japanese homophones to understand whether the meaning of a homophone affects its duration. We do so within the framework of the Discriminative Lexicon. We calculate measures to predict word forms from meanings, and use these measures in a statistical analysis to predict the duration of homophones. We found that meaning predicts the duration of a word, and also the duration of a mora. Furthermore we found that the duration of a homophone additionally depends on the density of its semantic neighborhood.