Assimilation and anticipation in word perception (original) (raw)

1998, Conference of the International Speech Communication Association

Words in connected speech are often assimilated to subsequent words. Some property of that upcoming word may then be determined in advance; these advance assimilatory cues may facilitate perception of that word. A gating experiment was conducted in Dutch, studying anticipatory voice assimilation between plosives, in 24 two-word combinations. In Dutch, voicing in a word-final plosive can only be caused by anticipatory assimilation to the next, voiced initial plosive, e.g. "rie[db]lint". Voiced and unvoiced variants of final and initial plosives were cross-spliced. Responses for assimilated, voiced-final stimuli show a strong bias to voiced-initial responses, as predicted. Even at longer gates in the hybrid condition "rie[dp]lint", after hearing the unvoiced initial plosive, listeners often came up with a voicedinitial response, with high confidence. Hence, advance phonological 'voiced-initial' cues were often stronger than acoustic 'unvoiced-initial' cues. These gating results suggest that listeners use advance assimilatory cues in word perception.

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