Demanding reductions - how massive reductions can be a burden on speech perception

One of the most important features of conversational speech is its variability. Two different speakers utter the same word very differently. Even the same word uttered by the same speaker twice, will not be identical. We also know that even small changes in the speech signal can hamper speech perception processes drastically. A simple change of segments can lead to problems for listeners identifying the correct lexical entries. On a theoretical level, variation, especially due to reduction processes, arguably should pose obstacles for speech perception. For instance, the number of segments or syllables can different from the one (canonical) representation due to reduction in conversational speech. Thus, speech perception is not trivial, but works quite well in everyday situations, even when listeners and speakers interact in very noisy surroundings.