Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In everyday conversations, words are often pronounced differently than dictionaries would suggest. For example, the French word “chemin” can be pronounced as “ch’min” and the English word “yesterday” might be pronounced as “yeshay”. This kind of phonological variation challenges traditional models of language processing which are built on the assumption that words are produced in a single, unreduced way. Yet, little is known about the processes and representations that are involved in the recognition of reduced speech. In this talk, I will present work that examines the interaction between the recognition of reduced words and the processing of syntactic information. During the first part of the talk, I will present three eye-tracking experiments that investigate the influence of word-order in formation on the recognition of past participles that contain a reduced schwa. In the second part of the talk, I will present an ERP study examining how speech reductions influence the detection of gender agreement errors during sentence processing. The results of these studies show that the effect of speech reduction on linguistic processing is not limited to a single level of representation. Instead, recognizing reduced speech influences the linguistic system in a cascaded manner and requires flexible adjustments across multiple levels of processing.