How are words reduced in spontaneous speech?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0042/000101Keywords:
reduction, spontaneous speech, Dutch, German, functional constraintsAbstract
Words are reduced in spontaneous speech. If reductions are constrained by functional (i.e., perception and production) constraints, they should not be arbitrary. This hypothesis was tested by examining the pronunciations of high- to mid-frequency words in a Dutch and a German spontaneous speech corpus. In logistic regression models, the "reduction likelihood" of a phoneme was predicted by fixed-effect predictors such as position within the word, word length, word frequency, and stress, as well as random effects such as phoneme identity and word. The models for Dutch and German show many commonalities. This is in line with the assumption that similar functional constraints influence reductions in both languages.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Holger Mitterer (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
