Earlier work has shown that the acoustic landmarks in speech [1,2], proposed to be important in lexical access, are largely preserved in spontaneous American English Speech [3]. Moreover, the loss of acoustic landmarks predicted from word's lexical representation is systematic and predictable. This study reports preliminary analysis of factors that govern whether a landmark will be realized as predicted, or will be changed or apparently omitted. A classification tree is designed to predict the

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... eletion/change or preservation of a landmark in a corpus of spontaneous American English using contextual factors that include prosody, word structure, morphosyntactic categories and landmark type.