Exploring the role of exposure frequency in recognizing pronunciation variants

Words can be pronounced in multiple ways in casual speech. Corpus analyses of the frequency with which these pronunciation variants occur (e.g., Patterson & Connine, 2001) show that typically, one pronunciation variant tends to predominate; this raises the question of whether variant recognition is aligned with exposure frequency. We explored this issue in words containing one of four phonological contexts, each of which favors one of four surface realizations of word-medial /t/: [t], [ʔ], [ɾ], or a deleted variant. The frequencies of the four realizations in all four contexts were estimated for a set of words in a production experiment. Recognition of all pronunciation variants was then measured in a lexical decision experiment. Overall, the data suggest that listeners are sensitive to variant frequency: Word classification rates closely paralleled production frequency. The exceptions to this were [t] realizations (i.e., canonical pronunciations of the words), a finding which confirms other results in the literature and indicates that factors other than exposure frequency affect word recognition.