Syntactic predictability in the recognition of carefully and casually produced speech

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past participles and auxiliary verbs in Dutch subordinate clauses. Acoustic-phonetic reliability was manipulated by presenting sentences either in a careful or a casual speaking style. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants recognized past participles more quickly when they occurred after their associated auxiliary verbs than when they preceded them. Response measures tapping into later stages of processing suggested that this effect was stronger for casually than for carefully produced sentences. These findings provide further evidence that syntactic predictability can influence word recognition and that this type of information is particularly useful for coping with acoustic-phonetic reductions in conversational speech. We conclude that listeners dynamically adapt to the different sources of linguistic information available to them.