The effect of reduction on the processing of flaps and /g/ in isolated words

Abstract This study investigates the comprehension of words with reduced and unreduced flaps and /g/s by means of an auditory lexical decision task. The experimental stimuli are compared to words produced in various speech styles confirming their naturalness and illustrating the distribution of the experimental stimuli. The experiment shows that reduced words are more difficult to process than unreduced words, and that listeners' response latencies for unreduced words are longest for the highest and lowest frequencies. Listeners' error rates are highest for the lowest frequency items. A comparison of the flap stimuli to the /g/ stimuli reveals no difference in processing between the two phonemes. When an acoustic measure (change in intensity) is used as a predictor, instead of a dichotomous factor contrasting reduced with unreduced, items on the extreme ends of the acoustic measure (very reduced or very unreduced) have longer response latencies than the middle items. The results of the second analysis supports the view that listeners optimize comprehension for intermediate degrees of reduction. The data also suggests that production frequency, or predictability (e.g., the likelihood of a reduced flap) affects the comprehension of reduced and unreduced words, such that highly predictable productions have shorter response latencies.

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