ISCA Archive Interspeech 2012
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2012

Co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech

Malte C. Viebahn, Mirjam Ernestus, James M. McQueen

This paper presents a corpus study that investigates the co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech. We extracted Dutch past participles from three different speech registers and investigated the influence of several predictor variables on the presence and duration of schwas in prefixes and /t/s in suffixes. Our results suggest that reduced word forms tend to co-occur even if we partial out the effect of speech rate. The implications of our findings for episodic and abstractionist models of lexical representation are discussed.

Index Terms: speech production, spontaneous speech, speech reduction