Assimilation of word-final nasals to following word-initial place of articulation in United Kingdom English

Renwick, Margaret E. L.; Baghai-Ravary, Ladan; Temple, Ros; Coleman, John

doi:10.1121/1.4800279

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…In total, 64% of the tokens were rated YES by both workers, which corresponds very closely with the findings by Renwick et al (2013). Workers rejected 20% of the tokens (assigning two NO ratings) and did not agree on the remaining 15% (assigning one YES and one NO rating).…”

Section: Selection Of the Datasupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Previous investigations have found that the Spoken BNC word-level transcriptions used to generate the Audio BNC segmental transcriptions are misaligned or otherwise not audible in approximately one-third of the tokens (Renwick, Baghai-Ravary, Temple, & Coleman, 2013). To ensure that the present analysis was conducted using only correctly aligned tokens, each token was verified using Mechanical Turk.…”

Section: Selection Of the Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Abstract and Lexically Specific Information in Sound Patterns: Evidence from /r/-sandhi in Rhotic and Non-rhotic Varieties of English

Cohen-Goldberg

2015

Lang Speech

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Phonological theories differ as to whether phonological knowledge is abstract (e.g., phonemic), concrete (e.g., exemplar-based), or some combination of the two. The abstractness/concreteness of phonological knowledge was examined by analyzing the process of /r/-sandhi in two corpora of spoken English. Two predictions of exemplar-based theories were examined: the extent to which a word manifests a particular sound pattern like /r/-deletion should be influenced by (1) its lexical frequency and (2) its distribution in the language with respect to the sound pattern's conditioning environment. Lexical frequency was found to influence /r/-sandhi in a corpus of rhotic American English but not in a corpus of predominantly non-rhotic British English. No effect of a word's long-term distribution was found in either corpus. These results support theories proposing that phonological knowledge is both word-specific and abstract and indicate that speakers do not store all phonetic detail that is in principle available to them. The factors that may favor the use of word-specific versus abstract representations are discussed.

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Section: Selection Of the Datasupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Selection Of the Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstract and Lexically Specific Information in Sound Patterns: Evidence from /r/-sandhi in Rhotic and Non-rhotic Varieties of English

Cohen-Goldberg

2015

Lang Speech

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“…While a growing body of research uses forced-alignment as the first step in acoustic analysis (e.g., Clayards & Doty, 2011;DiCanio, Nam, Amith, García, & Whalen, 2015;Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald, 2013;Renwick, Baghai-Ravary, Temple, & Coleman, 2013;Yuan & Liberman, 2011b), we also compared the results of the automatic alignment with results from a subset of data in which the /l/ boundaries were hand-adjusted. The subset of data consisted of 276 tokens (approximately 50%) selected randomly from Experiment 2 (e.g., freely, Healy, mealy and velum, realest, kneeless).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

Mackenzie

Olson

Clayards

et al. 2018

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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It is uncontroversial that, in many varieties of English, the realization of /l/ varies depending on whether /l/ occurs word-initially or word-finally. The nature of this effect, however, remains controversial. Previous analyses alternately analyzed the variation as darkening or lightening, and alternately found evidence that the variation involves a categorical distinction between allophones or a gradient scale conditioned by phonetic factors. We argue that these diverging conclusions are a result of the numerous factors influencing /l/ darkness and differences between studies in terms of which factors are considered. By controlling for a range of factors, our study demonstrates a pattern of variability that has not been shown in previous work. We find evidence of morpheme-final darkening and morpheme-initial lightening when compared to a baseline of morpheme-internal /l/. We also find segmental effects such that, in segmental contexts which independently darken /l/, one can observe /l/ lightening, and contexts which independently lighten /l/ can make lightening effects undetectable. Morphological and prosodic effects are hence sometimes trumped by segmental context. Once contextual effects are controlled for, there is evidence both for morphologically-conditioned /l/-darkening and for morphologicallyconditioned /l/-lightening, both of which can be understood as a result of prosodic differences reflecting morphological junctures.

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“…As concerns acoustic evidence, a study of the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al 2007), which consists of conversations of speakers from Ohio, found that 20 percent of final alveolar nasals assimilate to the following consonant. Evidence for variable incomplete/partial assimilation of labial and velar nasals to the following consonant has also been reported for a large corpus of British English (Renwick et al 2013). Finally, Mohaghegh (2016) found a very small difference between unassimilated coronal nasals and assimilated coronal and labial nasals in Canadian English.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Variable assimilation of English word-final /n/: electropalatographic evidence

Kochetov¹,

Colantoni²,

Steele³

2020

English Language and Linguistics

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The phonetic realization of the English word-final alveolar nasal /n/ is known to be highly variable. Previous articulatory work has reported both gradient and categorical nasal place assimilation including considerable between-speaker differences. This work, however, has largely focused on a small subset of place contexts (namely, preceding velar /k, ɡ/) in a limited number of English varieties. The present article uses electropalatography to study the articulatory realization of /n/ in a wider range of phonetic contexts and read texts as produced by three speakers of Canadian English. The results reveal considerable inter- and intra-speaker differences in the rates of assimilation. Consistent with previous work, we observed a high degree of variation, both gradient and categorical, before velars. Substantial rates of assimilation were also observed before labials, where the process is unexpected from the point of view of gestural phonology but predicted by traditional phonological analyses. The variation in the place and stricture of /n/ before coronals was more limited and typically gradient. Finally, some differences were observed across the text conditions, with more assimilation occurring in carrier sentences than in the read passage and, to a more limited extent, in function than in content words.

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Assimilation of word-final nasals to following word-initial place of articulation in United Kingdom English

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Abstract and Lexically Specific Information in Sound Patterns: Evidence from /r/-sandhi in Rhotic and Non-rhotic Varieties of English

Abstract and Lexically Specific Information in Sound Patterns: Evidence from /r/-sandhi in Rhotic and Non-rhotic Varieties of English

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

Variable assimilation of English word-final /n/: electropalatographic evidence

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