Native speakers ‘reduce’ their pronunciations, i.e., they shorten and merge words. For instance, German native speakers may say “hama” for “haben wir” (‘have-we’). We examined to what extent such reductions are problematic for adolescent learners of a second language, after four years of high-school training; and whether the problems can be related to inadequate bottom-up and top-down processing. For this, 39 Dutch and 38 German adolescents heard either reduced or unreduced German full phrases and part-phrases (phrase-intelligibility task) and words (lexical decision task). The results show that (1) Learners perceive non-native reduced speech less accurately than unreduced speech and also judge it as less intelligible; (2) This reduced-form disadvantage occurs separately from factors such as speech rate, orthography and voice; (3) The disadvantage for non-native listeners is substantial and larger than that in native listeners. Therefore, it probably reflects a lack of experience with reduced (i.e., real-life) speech; and (4) Non-native reductions induce at least inadequate bottom-up processing in learners, and may make top-down processing less accessible. We interpret the findings as supporting the idea that experience with variants (here: reduced variants) is necessary to strengthen linguistic (word) representations.

母语人士“减少”他们的发音，即，他们缩短和合并单词。例如，德语母语人士可能会说“hama”代表“haben wir”（'have-we'）。我们研究了在四年的高中培训后，这种减少在多大程度上对第二语言的青少年学习者造成了问题；问题是否与自下而上和自上而下的处理不当有关。为此，39 名荷兰青少年和 38 名德国青少年听到减少或未减少的德语完整短语和部分短语（短语可理解性任务）和单词（词汇决策任务）。结果表明：（1）学习者感知非母语缩略语的准确度低于未缩略语，并认为其不易理解；(2) 这种简化形式的缺点与语速、正字法和语音等因素分开出现；(3)非母语听众的劣势比母语听众的劣势更大。因此，它可能反映了在减少（即现实生活）语音方面缺乏经验；(4) 非母语归约至少会导致学习者自下而上的处理不充分，并且可能使自上而下的处理变得更难获得。我们将这些发现解释为支持这样一种观点，即变体的经验（此处：减少的变体）对于加强语言（单词）表示是必要的。