INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Final /t/ Reduction in Dutch Past-Participles: The Role of Word Predictability and Morphological Decomposability

Iris Hanique, Mirjam Ernestus

Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands

This corpus study demonstrates that the realization of word-final /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.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hanique, Iris / Ernestus, Mirjam (2011): "Final /t/ reduction in dutch past-participles: the role of word predictability and morphological decomposability", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2849-2852.