Oliver Niebuhr

Reduction phenomena: hindrance or gain in speech communication?

In its traditional use, the term ‘reduction’ implies that the corresponding production phenomena

undermine the speech code and thus hinder speech communication. Distinctive features or entire

sound segments are lenited, elided, or take over features of neighbouring segments. A number of

studies in the past 20 years have contributed to attenuating this destructive view of speech reduction

by showing (a) that reduction is a gradual rather than a categorical process, i.e. local exponents of

the reduced features or sounds remain, and (b) that listeners can easily handle (and may under some

circumstances even perceptually revert) reduction processes. The talk aims at continuing this line of

evidence.

Based on recent production and perception studies on German, it is argued that even those reduction

processes that appear complete at the level of sound segments often leave salient traces of the

affected sound(s) in the form of ‘articulatory prosodies’. Moreover, it seems that speech reduction is

not only driven by reducing production efforts. Reduction phenomena (in their specific contexts)

also convey communication functions that relate to discourse organization and speaker attitudes. In

summary, the growing body of evidence amounts to the conclusion that reduction is actually more

of a gain than a hindrance in speech communication.