The functional phonology of reduced forms

Project summary

In fluent casual speech, words are commonly reduced, for example, the German word eigentlich may even be pronounced something like ei. Hardly any research yet has aimed at understanding such reduction phenomena. This may be partly because, curiously, neither speakers nor listeners are aware of these reductions. The current project puts segmental re-ductions in the center of attention and investigates the intriguing questions of how such forms come to be produced and how listeners can recover the intended meaning. The project adopts the framework of functional phonology and will elucidate to what extent the exact shape of reduced forms—that is, which segments stay ("ei") and which segments are reduced ("gentlich")—falls rather naturally out of perceptual and articulatory constraints. Such a functional view may also explain the odd lack of awareness for reduced forms. By taking a functional view on reductions, this project has the potential of not only investigating the linguistic question of the relation between full and reduced forms, but also the psychological questions concerning the perception and production of these forms. This proposal applies the new approaches of exemplar theory and functional phonology to reduction phenomena with an innovative mixture of linguistic, psychological, and psychophysiological methods.