Perception of phonetic detail in the identification of highly reduced words

Abstract

There is great phonetic variation of words in context, conditioned by phonetic environment, word type, and speaking style in different communicative situations. Function words and modal particles are particularly susceptible to having their phonetic weight and complexity reduced, especially in casual spontaneous speech. But even if whole strings of segments are no longer delimitable in reduced forms compared with fuller pronunciations of the same lexical items, there will still be articulatory prosodies, superimposed upon the remaining sound material, which retain essential components of the fuller forms, the phonetic essence that characterizes the whole form class of a word. The extreme reduction [a ɪ ˜ i ˜ ] of the German modal particle eigentlich ‘actually’ [aɪ(ɡ)ŋ.(t)(l)i(ç)] is a case in point. The length, palatality and nasality of its gliding movement reflect the polysyllabicity, the central nasal consonant and the final palatal syllable of the fuller forms. It is assumed that this phonetic essence triggers lexical identification in the listener. Therefore two perceptual identification experiments were carried out. They showed the crucial role of the duration of a palatal gliding section in the diphthong [a ɪ ˜ i ˜ ] to distinguish between eine__ ‘one__’ and eigentlich’ne__ ‘actually a__’. A third test showed further that listeners reacted differently to the palatal glide duration in different reduction environments, which may be related to different functional assessment of reduced forms in situational contexts.