Final /t / reduction in Dutch past-participles:

This corpus study demonstrates that the realization of word-final /t / in Dutch past-participles in various speech styles is af-fected by a word’s predictability and paradigmatic relative fre-quency. In particular, /t/s are shorter and more often absent if the two preceding words are more predictable. In addition, /t/s, especially in irregular verbs, are more reduced, the lower the verb’s lemma frequency relative to the past-participle’s fre-quency. Both effects are more pronounced in more spontaneous speech. These findings are expected if speech planning plays an important role in speech reduction. Index Terms: pronunciation variation, acoustic reduction, cor-pus research, word predictability, morphological decomposabi-lity 1