Differential Shortening of Repeated Content Words Produced in Various Communicative Contexts

Three experiments examined the conditions under which repeated words undergo durational shortening in speech. Previous research (Fowler and Housum, 1987) showed that repeated content words are shortened in spontaneous speech. One experiment in the present series found no shortening when words are produced in lists. in a second experiment, reductions were observed for the same words produced in meaningful prose. Words preceded by homophones did not undergo shortening. The findings suggest that shortenings reflect talkers' exploitation of a word's redundancy in the context of a discourse. A final experiment found more shortening of content words produced in a communicative context than in the same discourse, transcribed and read into a microphone. Possibly, the tendency to shorten is increased by the presence of a listener; alternatively, it may reflect the slower speech rate characteristic of spontaneous as compared to read speech.