Phonetic reduction and informational redundancy in self-initiated self-repair in Dutch

This paper presents a phonetic analysis of instances of self-initiated self-repair taken from a corpus of Dutch conversation, focusing on their temporal and articulatory characteristics. In particular, the paper investigates whether error repairs and appropriateness repairs, two subtypes of self-repair which differ in the degree of informational redundancy of the repair stretch, are different in terms of the phonetic relationship between reparandum and repair stretch. One might expect error repairs, whose repair stretch is more informative than that of appropriateness repairs, to be associated with local hyperarticulation in the repair stretch, while appropriateness repairs are more likely to be associated with phonetic reduction. Furthermore, the frequent presence of informationally redundant editing terms and repeated lexical items is expected to result in variation within the repair stretch along a hypo–hyper continuum. The paper reports on temporal measurements with controls for the internal structure of the repair, as well as auditory analysis and an attempt at quantifying a ‘reduction quotient’ for the stretches involved. The results show that local hyperarticulation is rare, and increased phonetic reduction in the repair stretch widespread. No significant differences between error and appropriateness repairs are observed. The findings are discussed with reference to the role of information status and pragmatic constraints in governing variation in speech production.