Contraction use as a measure of speaker choice in spontaneous speech

One useful source of data for testing psycholinguistic theories of utterance planning is the choices speakers make in spontaneous speech. Speakers will often be able to choose between multiple syntactic structures, lexical items to fill those frames, and pronunciations of those lexical items. The choices speakers make at each of these levels can reveal the strategies they're using and the priorities of the processing system.

This study investigates morpho-syntactic reduction, or contraction, in American English. This includes examples like

I [am/'m] happy today
You[have/'ve] been happy lately
He was[not/n't] happy yesterday

For more detail continue to the lab log.