Discovering ways in which online contextual conditioning constrains target tokens in production has long been an important focus of linguistic inquiry. This chapter focuses on an under-utilized, contextually informed frequency measure: words' likelihood of use in a discourse context conditioning variation. It summarizes numerous independent lines of research that reinforce an important usage-based assumption. The lexical differentiation derived through use can then contribute to variation, as reduced forms become targets for production. The chapter demonstrates independent effects of (extra)linguistic conditioning factors both from the online target context as well as from the lexically specific accumulation in memory of usage patterns. The decision to estimate cumulative contextual conditioning effects on a class of words or effects on individual words will depend upon the research criteria. The chapter presents detailed studies measuring the accumulation of conditioning factors such as speech rate, adjacent phones, syntactic position, and predictability.
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