THE COMPREHENSION OF ACOUSTICALLY REDUCED MORPHOLOGICALLY COMPLEX WORDS: THE ROLES OF DELETION, DURATION, AND FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE

Mirjam Ernestus & Harald Baayen
Radboud University Nijmegen & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

ID 1091
[full paper]

This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that at the macro level, segment deletions lead to delayed comprehension. At the micro level, however, longer durations appear to increase lexical competition, either from the word's stem (Experiment 1) or from the word's morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slows down especially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet listeners' needs when they reduce especially high frequency words.