Use of surrounding speech rate in perception of reduced speech

In casual speech, reductions and deletions are common, posing challenges for listeners to identify intended forms. Prior studies emphasize acoustic cues in decoding reduced speech, showing that surrounding speech rate influences the perception of ambiguous reduced function words, such as “leisure (or) time.” Building upon our group's previous perception experiment, this study investigates whether listeners use surrounding speech rate cues to differentiate verb tense in ambiguous reduced forms like “he’s” versus “he was,” which may both be realized as [ɨz]. Specifically, we test if listeners' identification of tense is influenced by the ratio of surrounding speech rate to target duration. Results show that when the target [ɨz] is relatively short compared to its surrounding context—resulting in a high surrounding-to-target duration ratio—listeners more frequently perceive it as “he was.” This interpretation likely arises because listeners attribute the high duration ratio to extreme phonetic reduction, assuming [ɨz] originated from a longer form (“he was”) containing an additional consonant ([w]). Conversely, when the duration of [ɨz] closely matches its context, listeners typically perceive it as “he’s.” These findings suggest listeners integrate local speech rate cues to resolve ambiguities in reduced speech.