Cognate status modulates the comprehension of isolated reduced forms

There are competing theories about the representation of reduced variants of words in the mental lexicon. At the same time, speech reduction is known to cause problems for non-natives' speech comprehension. We investigate whether processing of full and reduced forms of cognates can help to better understand how reduced forms are represented in the mental lexicon. In an English auditory lexical decision task during which the brain response (EEG) was recorded, highly proficient Dutch learners of English listened to full and reduced forms of cognates and non-cognates. In the reduced forms, schwa was omitted. This schwa reduction occurred in either poststress or prestress position. While behavioural data (accuracy and reaction time) did not yield convincing information about the status of reduced forms, EEG data strongly suggest that form representations play an important role, in both prestress and poststress words. The results have clear implications for theories and models of spoken word recognition.