Perceptual features of weak forms of words 
in sociopolitical discourse

The paper aims to identify the perceptual features of weak forms of Russian word in semantically uninformative environment and to compare them to their acoustic features obtained earlier, particularly, to find out how Russian listeners react to a certain natural modification in narrower context. 66 tokens (38 from female speech and 28 from male speech) segmented from 6 Russian middle-aged and older speakers (3 males and 3 females). The choice was determined by the presence of one natural phonetic modification or more. 2 groups of Russian speakers (university teachers and students), mostly female, listened to the tokens. The obtained listeners’ reactions were classified by modification type and statistically processed. As a result, first, it was found that for 100% of male and 69,4% of female tokens containing coalescence, canonical number of syllables was not discriminated. On the whole, the results on vowel and consonant omission are rather similar to coalescence. Second, while perceiving consonant changes resulting from assimilation processes, canonical consonant was identified by listeners only for 24,6–31,4% of the tokens. Third, in tokens containing non-canonical vowel quality modification, canonical vowel was identified only for 25,7% of the tokens. The obtained results demonstrate how drastically the phonetic shapes of Russian grammatical and meaningful words can change in the flow of speech compared to their canonical phonetic shapes.