Co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech

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 sev-eral predictor variables on the presence and duration of schwas in prefixes and /t/s in suffixes. Our results sug-gest 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 lex-ical representation are discussed. Index Terms: speech production, spontaneous speech, speech reductio