Snoeren, N. D., Segui, J., & Halle, P. A. (2008). Perceptual processing of partially and fully assimilated words in French. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception Performance, 34(1), 193–204.
Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sally
Providing the first empirical data supporting the hypothesis that the role of context is modulated by assimilation strength, this study investigated the perceptual consequences of regressive voice assimilation in French. Pattern of this phonological variation is asymmetric, i.e., voiceless stops are usually fully assimilated in a voiced environment, while voiced ones are incompletely assimilated in a voiceless environment. Two experiments were conducted to test for perceptual compensation for assimilation in target words with voiceless and voiced stop offsets. Both experiments tested on native French speakers using an auditory-visual cross-modal form-priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, where the following context of the target words was absent, a stronger priming effect was found for canonical (unassimilated) forms than assimilated counterparts. In Experiment 2, in which the only difference from Experiment 1 was that the right context being made available, the same result was obtained. Furthermore, with the presence of the right context, the priming effect increased for assimilated voiceless-stop words, but no significant difference was found for assimilated voiced-stop words. It is suggested that for fully assimilated forms (the voiceless segments), the presence of the right context facilitates underlying form recovery, whereas this effect was not observed for incomplete assimilated forms (the voiced segments). Contextual information and bottom-up information, the two sources of information originated from assimilation, are thus believed to be complementary, and both are involved during the processing of assimilated forms.
