Neural mechanisms for coping with acoustically reduced speech

In spoken language, reductions of word forms occur regularly and need to be accommodated by the listener. Intriguingly, this accommodation is usually achieved without any apparent effort. The neural bases of this cognitive skill are not yet fully understood. We here presented participants with reduced words that were either preceded by a related or an unrelated visual prime and compared electric brain responses to reduced words with those to their full counterparts. In time-domain, we found a positivity between 400 and 600 ms differing between reduced and full forms. A later positivity distinguished primed and unprimed words and was modulated by reduction. In frequency-domain, alpha suppression was stronger for reduced than for full words. The time- and frequency-domain reduction effects converge towards the view that reduced words draw on attention and memory mechanisms. Our data demonstrate the importance of interactive processing of bottom-up and top-down information for the comprehension of reduced words.