New paper: Schwa density as a phonological register classifier (pre-registered, four-corpus replication)

Kyle Townsend via Corpora <[email protected]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:16:45 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.science.linguistics.corpora
Message-ID	<CAMj9D0_KTU9W7tQEGJprEkj0xdp9SheNNB5x-KHLupLCOhv2BQ@mail.gmail.com>

Dear colleagues,

  I'd like to share a new preprint on single-feature register
  classification in English text:

  "Schwa Density as a Phonological Stylistic Classifier: Primary
  Stylistic, Secondary Modality -- A Four-Corpus Pre-Registered
  Replication"

    Preprint:
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009926/current.pdf?_s=WPGovroKhmABLC0P
    Materials/code:
https://github.com/kylegtownsend-collab/schwa-density-spgc
    Paper site:     https://papers.letsharkness.com/schwa-density/

  The paper tests whether schwa density -- the proportion of vowel
  phones in a text that are unstressed schwa (CMUdict AH0) -- can
  serve as a phonologically motivated single-feature register
  classifier. A pre-registered confirmatory plan was applied to NLTK
  multi-source (N=164) and the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus
  (N=2,767), with sensitivity analyses on Brown (N=313) and OANC
  (N=4,375).

  Headline findings:

   - Schwa density matches or exceeds Flesch-Kincaid on all
     pre-registered corpora.

   - A function-word ablation (masking the 198 NLTK English stopwords
     before computing schwa density) preserves or amplifies register
     discrimination on all four corpora (eta^2 retention 0.93-1.27),
     ruling out stopword frequency as a confound.

   - The ablation operationalises a two-regime finding: schwa density
     functions as a Primary Stylistic Feature on within-prose
     variation (NLTK, SPGC, Brown) and a Secondary Modality Feature on
     speech-versus-writing variation (OANC).

   - Joint partial-eta^2 retains 46-53% of the register signal on the
     pre-registered corpora after controlling jointly for syllables
     per word, mean word length, and Latinate ratio.

  The pre-registration, deviation log, analyser, ablation and
  G2P-fallback scripts, per-corpus feature tables, and
  figure-generation code are all openly available in the repository
  (MIT / CC-BY-4.0).

  Comments and criticisms welcome.

Thanks,
Kyle Townsend
Independent
[email protected]

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