Morphological status mediates effects of segmental deletion on comprehension

Although recent studies have shown that morphological status affects the pronunciation of segments, very little is known about how this pronunciation variation affects comprehension. We investigated how [n] deletion affected the comprehension of Dutch verbs in which -/ən/ either formed the plural suffix or was part of the verb stem in the singular form. An auditory lexical decision experiment revealed that listeners responded slower to pronunciations variants in which [n] was deleted but only when they heard a singular verb. Additionally, for certain singular verbs, we found that [n] deletion resulted in more mistakes. We conclude that pronunciation variants that occur more frequently in a certain morphological category are easier to recognize if they are encountered in words belonging to that morphological category. These findings support word comprehension models in which pronunciation variants are stored in lexical or morphological representations.