We investigated cross-language influences in the representation and acquisition of Dutch word gender by native speakers of German. Participants named pictures in Dutch, using gender-marked noun phrases, and were trained on this task using feedback. Nouns differed in gender compatibility and cognate status with respect to German. The results show clear effects of cross-language gender compatibility and cognate status on response accuracy, certainty, and consistency. Feedback during training reduced gender errors approximately by half, and affected the different item conditions similarly. Furthermore, relative to the initial error rates, incorrect gender responses given with great certainty were not harder to modify than those with lower certainty. The results provide insights into the nature and stability of correct and incorrect gender representations in L2, and demonstrate the pervasiveness of transfer from the first to the second language even after intensive training.

This paper investigates the nature of reduction phenomena in informal speech. It addresses the question whether reduction processes that affect many word types, but only if they occur in connected informal speech, may be categorical in nature. The focus is on reduction of schwa in the prefixes and on word-final /t/ in Dutch past participles. More than 2000 tokens of past participles from the Ernestus Corpus of Spontaneous Dutch and the Spoken Dutch Corpus (both from the interview and read speech component) were transcribed automatically. The results demonstrate that the presence and duration of /t/ are affected by approximately the same phonetic variables, indicating that the absence of /t/ is the extreme result of shortening, and thus results from a gradient reduction process. Also for schwa, the data show that mainly phonetic variables influence its reduction but its presence is affected by different and more variables than its duration, which suggests that the absence of schwa may result from gradient as well as categorical processes. These conclusions are supported by the distributions of the segments' durations. These findings provide evidence that reduction phenomena which affect many words in informal conversations may also result from categorical reduction processes.

This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed.Keywords: speech comprehension, exemplar effects, pronunciation variation, acoustic reduction 3 Several models of speech comprehension assume that the mental lexicon stores the pronunciation of a word with two types of representations, namely abstract representations and exemplars (e.g., Goldinger, 2007;McLennan, Luce, and Charles-Luce, 2003). Abstract representations are strings of sound symbols like phonemes or phonological features, which only contain information about acoustic properties that distinguish between these symbols. In contrast, clouds of exemplars represent many occurrences of words that the language user has uttered or heard. Each exemplar is a detailed representation corresponding to the speech signal of one occurrence and thus contains subtle acoustic information, for example about the word's exact pronunciation or the speaker's voice. Many articles in the literature point to a role of exemplars in word comprehension. This study investigates the robustness of these exemplar effects.Exemplar effects have been established in several priming experiments (e.g., Bradlow, Nygaard, and Pisoni, 1999;Craik and Kirsner, 1974;Goh, 2005;Goldinger, 1996;Janse, 2008;Mattys and Liss, 2008;McLennan et al., 2003;McLennan and Luce, 2005;Palmeri, Goldinger, and Pisoni, 1993).These experiments contained repeated words and the comprehension of the second occurrence of a word (the target) is expected to be facilitated by the first occurrence (the prime). Primes and targets were completely identical, that is the same token, or they differed in speech rate, time-compression, the realization of a certain segment (e.g., intervocalic /t,d/ produced as [t,d] or as a flap in American English), or the speaker's voice. Most experiments showed...