The role of episodic memories in synchronic variation: evidence from Spanish /bdɡ/

This study empirically investigates the relationship between a language user’s accumulation of episodic memories from a word’s typical context of use and that word’s pronunciation via analyses of 20 Mexican Spanish speakers’ realizations of 4,961 Spanish /bdɡ/-initial words to test a unique claim of an exemplar model of lexical representation that words’ representations contain fine-grained phonetic information. Each word’s cumulative exposure to a phonological and a prosodic context conditioning /bdɡ/ reduction is estimated from a large corpus, as are other aspects of each word’s idiosyncratic usage. The results from a Frequentist linear mixed-effects regression model reveal that /bdɡ/ reduction is impacted by a word’s cumulative exposure to its typical phonological, but not prosodic, context. There are also some additive effects of a word’s cumulative exposure to its typical context and other aspects of a word’s usage patterns, as well as with the immediate context. However, model simulations demonstrate that statistical evidence for these interactions is highly dependent on dataset size. Notwithstanding, the main effect of a word’s typical context on production remains robust. The results yield support and challenges for an exemplar model of lexical representation, as well as other theoretical models. Above all, the results suggest that phonological categories are best understood by considering a user’s experience with words in the contexts in which they occur.