The Comprehension of Acoustically Reduced Morphologically Complex Words: the Roles of Deletion, Duration, and Frquency of Occurrence

This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words ap­ peared to increase lexical competition, either from the word’s stem (Experiment 1) or from the word’s morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slowed down espe­ cially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet lis­ teners’ needs when they reduce especially high fre­ quency words.