Reduction of word final /st/-clusters in monosyllabic and compound nouns in Dutch dialects

TitleReduction of word final /st/-clusters in monosyllabic and compound nouns in Dutch dialects
Publication TypePresentation
Year of Publication2014
Conference NameDag van de Fonetiek 2014
AuthorsBroos, Wouter
PublisherNederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen
Conference LocationUtrecht, The Netherlands
Abstract

The main research question of this article was whether different reduced word forms are stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker. This was answered by means of a production experiment where participants coming from Roosendaal and Ede had to read phrases that were presented to them. These phrases contained two nouns, the first ending in the cluster /st/ and the second beginning with a consonant.

Reduced word forms were measured and results show that the effect of dialect were strongly significant with regard to the pronunciation of /s/ (F(1, 1022) = 78.399; p < .001) and /t/ (F(1, 1022) = 736.293; p < .001). Specifically, people speaking the dialect of Ede pronounced /t/ in such a way that it added up to a total of 5% of the total word while this was 16% for the people of Roosendaal.

The final experiment contained a lexical decision task and it showed that people from Ede were a lot less accurate when compared to speakers of Roosendaal (41.66% less accurate, to be exact). This means that people from Ede often perceived reduced words as words. We propose a hybrid-model of word recognition.