Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of theindividual in sound change processes. Do fast speakers have aunique role in sound change processes? Fast speech leads togreater rates of lenition (reduction). But should it mean thatfast talkers would be more likely to lenite even when speak-ing slowly? In two corpus studies we show that even whenfast talkers speak more slowly they are (a) more likely to omitsegments and (b) more likely to perform variable reduction ofconsonants. This draws attention to habitual speech rate as alikely factor in the actuation of lenition processes.