Articulatory Planning Is Continuous and Sensitive to Informational Redundancy

This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and tar-get words. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictability from the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven target words. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all target words equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.