Niebuhr, O. (submitted) Phonetic details in the perception of highly reduced utterances. Manuscript submitted to the Special Issue on speech reduction in the Journal of Phonetics, following the First Nijmegen Speech
Reduction Workshop, March 2008.
The concept of reduction implies that the speech code becomes less informative and hence less clear with regard to the identification of lexical units. For example, highly reduced utterances can approximate other less reduced ones. Based on such pairs of utterances, a perception experiment is performed for German, which shows that the subjects’ interpretations of the stimuli can be changed from the less to the highly reduced utterance, just by lengthening those sound sections that mirror the global phonetic qualities of the segments that are regarded as elided in the highly reduced utterances. Perceptually relevant phonetic detail like this raises doubts about the conceptual adequacy of phonological processes like assimilation and elision, in line with other acoustic findings. It also suggests that that reduction does not necessarily entail a loss of information value in connection with the decoding of words. Moreover, the results of the perception experiment indicate that reduction or its degree is not a mere consequence of a (situation-dependent) balance between economy and intelligibility. Rather, reduction has a separate meaning and hence a separate source of variation in that it conveys the willingness of the speaker to co-operate with the listener.
