Prosodic Effects on Word Reduction

Abstract

It is widely known that English-speaking children reduce words by omitting syllables in certain predictable patterns (e.g., banána ~n ána). One way to better understand the nature of phonological reductions in children is to examine adults'word reduction behavior. This study explored whether adults produce predictable output patterns when reducing words. Undergraduate participants heard a list of polysyllabic words varying systematically across syllable number and primary stress location and were asked to generate a “reduced” form, similar to common English reductions (e.g., rhinóceros~ rhíno). Regardless of stress and syllable number, participants reduced the stimulus words significantly more often to left-headed disyllabic or monosyllabic feet, retaining stressed syllables and omitting unstressed syllables. The general bias found was similar to that which children exhibit in natural speech, namely, to maintain well-formed prosodic patterns and preserve salient syllables. On the other hand, a tendency to preserve word-initial instead of word-final syllables was also found, suggesting subtle differences in language processing between children and adults. The current study contributes to the psycholinguistic literature on adults' syllable omissions in abbreviations and fast-speech registers by examining the processing strategies that adults may use when reducing words.

The prosodic property of lexical stress affects eye movements during silent reading

“…in fast speech or in conditions of stress shift), lexical stress plays an important role in spoken language production and perception (Greenberg, Carvey, Hitchcock, & Chang, 2003). Adults are more likely to omit unstressed syllables than stressed syllables when speaking (Carter & Clopper, 2002). Mattys and Samuel (1997) demonstrated that mispronunciations of stressed syllables impaired lexical access more than mispronunciations of unstressed syllables.…”

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast

“…For example, brunch (breakfast + lunch), fantabulous (fantastic + fabulous), entertoyment (entertainment + toy) etc. This linguistic form of word reduction has been studied widely [8,10,12,13,14,24,36,44,50].…”

The Nationwide Speech Project: A new corpus of American English dialects

“…Each of the 14 monophthongal and diphthongal vowels in American English was included at least four times in the CVC list and the following consonantal context for each vowel was varied to include liquids, nasals, and voiceless and voiced obstruents. The multi-syllabic word list was a subset of 112 of the stimulus materials originally designed by Carter and Clopper (2002) for their study of word reduction by normal-hearing adults. The words in the list were balanced for number of syllables (two, three, or four), location of primary stress (first, second, or third syllable), and morphological complexity (monomorphemic or polymorphemic).…”