Frequency effects in Southern Min syllable contraction

Taiwan Southern Min syllable contraction, like many lenition processes, it is known to be influenced by lexical frequency. To explore the mechanism behind this influence, a shadowing experiment was run. The primary dependent measures were acoustic correlates of intersyllabic segment reduction and tonal merger. Independent measures included lexical frequency, production latency (as a measure of processing difficulty), and duration (as a measure of speaking rate). Isolated tokens were produced in random order, eliminating contextual predictability. Regression analyses showed that segment reduction and tonal merger both correlated with lexical frequency, independently of the other factors. Further analyses suggested that a gradient increase in frequency was associated with a gradient increase in lenition, not just the probability of lenited vs. non-lenited allomorphs. Moreover, a second experiment showed that the degree of segment reduction in productions correlated with subjective familiarity estimates of auditorily presented contracted forms. The results are therefore consistent with an exemplar approach to both production and perception, even in a process that has traditionally been analyzed as categorical phonology.