Revealing mental representation through the lens of predictability

Predictability is one of the many factors which influences the phonetic expression of a linguistic unit. Contextual predictability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production (the probabilistic reduction effect).

In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the recent work on the probabilistic reduction effect and the existing accounts. I will show that the predictability of a linguistic unit does not only influence the phonetic expression in a given context, but it can more generally shape the mental representation of phonemes, words and even homophones.