Lexical activation by assimilated and reduced tokens

Running speech contains abundant assimilated and phonologically reduced tokens, but there is considerable debate about how such varied pronunciations disrupt access to the corresponding words in listeners’ mental lexicons. While previous studies have examined the effects of carefully produced or electronically edited reductions, we present two experiments which compare cross-modal repetition priming for lexical decision by more reduced spontaneous forms and less reduced read forms of the same words uttered by the same speakers in the same phrases. Though less priming is found for the more reduced spontaneous tokens, both versions of words produce significant priming effects, whether the majority of stimuli are taken from spontaneous speech (Experiment 1) or from read speech (Experiment 2). Priming is more robust if the tokens themselves contain the context licensing the reduction.