This book represents a contribution to the study of phonetic reduction. It presents the first quantitative investigation of acoustic-phonetic reduction in Icelandic and deals with the reduction patterns of a class of Icelandic adverbs ending in the suffix ?lega. Three questions are asked: Which factors influence the reduction patterns of these adverbs? How do the factors compare to those found for other languages? Which conclusions can be drawn from adverb reduction about the possible mental storage of reduced forms?

The data used for this study are both corpus-based and experiment-based. The corpus-based part investigates a range of factors that could influence reduction, most importantly adverb token frequency and metrical rhythm. Two experimental studies further investigate the production of reduction patterns. In a shadowing task, metrical rhythm and frequency are studied in closer detail and a reading task provides additional data for a comparison between data types. From these data, conclusions are drawn about the nature of adverb reduction in Icelandic and the factors that influence reduction patterns.