On place assimilation in sibilant sequences—Comparing French and English

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

“…But others may be inherently gradient, such as place assimilation across word boundaries, which tends to be variable and involve various degrees of assimilation (cf. Niebuhr et al, 2011;Nolan, 1992, for review). CSD might also fall into this class of gradient process.…”

“…First of all, some proportion of CSD might involve complete deletion of /t/ rather than mere coarticulation with a following word. Several studies have found that in assimilatory sandhi processes, both categorical and gradient effects may be at play (Barry, 1985(Barry, , 1992Kochetov & Pouplier, 2008;Niebuhr et al, 2011;Nolan et al, 1996), suggesting that the variability of sandhi rules may not be entirely due to gradient gestural overlap or lessened gestural magnitude (see also Bermúdez-Otero, 2010, for discussion). Moreover, there is good evidence that gestural overlap itself is often planned, rather than just a surface result of temporal compression of gestures.…”

A following sibilant increases the ambiguity of a sibilant continuum

“…Most importantly, response rates for the two sibilant contexts were closer to chance across the continuum than those for vowel contexts (|z|=0.93, p< 0.001), which supports that flattening took place. Note that the flattening in the [s] context is unexpected if flattening only occurs in assimilation environments: Niebuhr et al (2011) showed that [s] is in fact not a trigger for assimilation, and yet the degree of flattening in [s] contexts is more similar to [S] contexts than vowel contexts. This supports the auditory interpretation in terms of perceptual integration.…”

“…This paper is concerned with the assimilation pattern observed with sibilants in English (Nolan, 1992). Niebuhr et al (2011) report that in English, there is assimilation to a following but not to a preceding sibilant, and furthermore, they present evidence for an asymmetry already noted in Nolan (1992). The alveolar fricative [s] assimilates to a following [S], but alveopalatal [S] does not assimilate to a following [s].…”

“…That is, place assimilation of sibilant sequences is asymmetric allowing for sequences such as "glash shoes" from "glass shoes" but not "fiss soup" from "fish soup" . Finally, Niebuhr et al (2011) found that there was almost always always complete assimilation when [s] was following by [S].…”