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Abstract

Casual speech is characterized by variation in how a single
word is pronounced (e.g. ‚probably’ as ‚probably’ but also
as ‚probly’). We investigated which lexical representations
French listeners use for understanding reduced words
that are pronounced without their schwa (e.g. ‚fnêtre’ for
‚fenêtre’). Thirty-six French native speakers performed an
auditory lexical decision task with 44 words produced either
with or without schwa. In addition, they rated the relative
frequency of the reduced variant compared to the full
variant for each word. Results show that listeners recognize
a given variant more quickly if it has a higher relative
frequency. This suggests that these relative frequencies are
stored, which implies that the reduced variants are stored
as well. These findings complement results reported by
Ranbom & Connine (2007) for the perception of variants
of words containing /nt/ in American English and by Bürki
et al. (2010) for the production of reduced schwa in French.
Given that reduction processes give rise to many different
pronunciation variants for a given word (e.g. ‚fenêtre’,
‚fnêtre’, ‚fenêtr’, ‚fnêtr’, ‚fnêt’), our results raise the question
of how the activations of these different pronunciation
variants play a role in the selection of their common word
node.