In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study…

We investigated the impact of contextual constraint on the integration of novel word meanings into semantic memory. Adults read strongly or weakly constraining sentences ending in known or unknown (novel) words as scalp-recorded electrical brain activity was recorded. Word knowledge was assessed via a lexical decision task in which recently seen…