Final /t/ reduction in Dutch past-participles: The role of word predictability and morphological decomposability
This corpus study demonstrates that the realization of wordfinal
/t/ in Dutch past-participles in various speech styles is affected
by a word’s predictability and paradigmatic relative frequency.
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 frequency.
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, corpus
research, word predictability, morphological decomposability
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