Morphological effects in speech reduction are speaker specific and may partly originate from the words’ most frequent phonological context

Recently, a number of studies have investigated whether the morphological status of a segment (e.g., whether a segment is part of a stem, a noun suffix, or verb suffix) affects its pronunciation. Most of these studies have focussed on English word final -s. The first aim of the current research was to extend the evidence for morpho-phonetic effects to a different word-ending. We focused on Dutch final -/ən/ as it occurs at the end of words’ stems, as the plural affix of nouns, as the plural affix of verbs, and as the infinitive affix. We found that, when inter-speaker differences are taken into account, morphological status affects the probability that the /n/ is realized as well as durational aspects of /ən/. Our second aim was to determine whether these morpho-phonetic effects can be explained by taking into account the phonological contexts the different morphological categories typically occur in. We found that the typical phonological context of words explains the morpho-phonetic effects only partially. These findings support the claim that morphology influences phonetic implementation. Moreover, they reaffirm the notion that models of word production should allow for phonetic detail in representations that are associated with lexical or morphological meaning.