neural mechanisms for coping with acoustically reduced speech in spoken language reductions of word forms occur regularly and need to be accommodated by the listener intriguingly this accommodation is usually achieved without any apparent effort the neural bases of this cognitive skill are not yet fully understood we here presented participants with reduced words that were either preceded by a related or an unrelated visual prime and compared electric brain responses to reduced words with those to their full counterparts in timedomain we found a positivity between 400 and 600ms differing between reduced and full forms a later positivity distinguished primed and unprimed words and was modulated by reduction in frequencydomain alpha suppression was stronger for reduced than for full words the time and frequencydomain reduction effects converge towards the view that reduced words draw on attention and memory mechanisms our data demonstrate the importance of interactive processing of bottomup and topdown information for the comprehension of reduced words