On the Role of Perception in Shaping Phonological Assimilation Rules

Abstract

Assimilation of nasals to the place of articulation of following consonants is a common and natural process among the world's languages. Recent phonological theory attributes this naturalness to the postulated geometry of articulatory features and the notion of spreading (McCarthy, 1988). Others view assimilation as a result of perception (Ohala, 1990), or as perceptually tolerated articulatory simplification (Kohler, 1990). Kohler notes that certain consonant classes (such as nasals and stops) are more likely than other classes (such as fricatives) to undergo place assimilation to a following consonant. To explain this pattern, he proposes that assimilation tends not to occur when the members of a consonant class are relatively distinctive perceptually, such that their articulatory reduction would be particularly salient. This explanation, of course, presupposes that the stops and nasals which undergo place assimilation are less distinctive than fricatives, which tend not to assimilate. We report experimental results that confirm Kohler's perceptual assumption: In the context of a following word initial stop, fricatives were less confusable than nasals or unreleased stops. We conclude, in agreement with Ohala and Kohler, that perceptual factors are likely to shape phonological assimilation rules.

Sink positive: Linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition

“…These processes are contextually driven sound changes that usually ease articulation; as a result, the segments surrounding the sound change, and the changed segment itself will overlap more with their phonological features (e.g., the final nasal of lean in lean bacon shares place of articulation with the following stop after assimilation). According to some phonological approaches, such phonological rules tend to lead to perceptually inconspicuous changes from the canonical form (e.g., Hura, Lindblom, & Diehl, 1992;Steriade, 2001). Although the frequency and the distribution of variant forms need to be considered in addition to perceptual changes (e.g., Ranbom et al, 2009), it can be said that the most common changes in L1 are not easily noticed.…”

Compensation for complete assimilation in speech perception: The case of Korean labial-to-velar assimilation

“…The fundamental assumption is that some sounds are perceptually more salient than others, such that the perceptually more robust sounds tend not to undergo phonological alterations for the listeners' benefit whereas perceptually weaker sounds tend to be phonologically modified, driven by the principle of ease of articulation. (See also Cho and McQueen (2008) and Hura, Lindblom, and Diehl (1992) for evidence for differential perceptual stability among different manners of articulations in line with this assumption.) Mitterer and colleagues extended this concept to include context effects: If a segment is difficult to be perceived in a given context, that segment is likely to be assimilated.…”

“…Note that the perceptual-integration account does not require assimilations to be incomplete; it only assumes that the assimilation has minimal perceptual consequences (cf. Hura et al, 1992). so that the assimilated version sounds very similar to the unassimilated version with the latter being perceptually integrated with the percept of the following contextual sound.…”

How we hear what is hardly there: Mechanisms underlying compensation for /t/-reduction in speech comprehension

“…How listeners recover the intended meaning from reduced forms has been a major focus of research in psycholinguistics, especially during the last decade, bridging the gap between the fields of spoken-word recognition and speech perception (e.g., Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002;Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996Gow, 2001Gow, , 2002Gow & Im, 2004;Hura, Lindblom, & Diehl, 1992;Kemps, Ernestus, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2004;Lahiri & Reetz, 2002;Mitterer & Blomert, 2003;Mitterer, Csépe, Honbolygo, & Blomert, 2006;Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006). Most studies focused on the perception of assimilated forms and converged on two findings.…”

“…Auditory processes play an important role in theories of speech production that allow perception to influence production (see, e.g., Boersma, 1998;de Boer, 2000;Hume & Johnson, 2001;Hura et al, 1992;Kohler, 1990;Lindblom, 1990;Mitterer, Csépe, Honbolygo, et al, 2006;Ohala, 1990;Schwartz, Boë, Valleé, & Abry, 1997;Steriade, 2001). In this view, listeners and speakers have conflicting interests: listeners prefer unreduced word forms, which facilitate word recognition, while speakers like to reduce as much as possible in order to minimize articulatory effort (Lindblom, 1990).…”