Academic literature on the topic 'Dorsal Fricative Assimilation'

Prosodification processes like syllabification and foot parsing are often limited to a particular morphological constituent; i.e. they do not apply across a morpheme boundary. Prince & Smolensky (1993) present a new interpretation of this phenomenon which identifies the edge of a morphological constituent, rather than the morphological constituent as such, as opaque to prosodification. On their view, the morphological boundedness of processes that erect metrical structure reflects the desire for a grammatical constituent edge to coincide with the edge of a prosodic constituent, formalised as ALIGN(GCat-Edge 1, PCat-Edge 1) in their theory. Since prosodification across a morpheme boundary results in a mismatch between the edges of a prosodic and a morphological constituent, it is blocked whenever alignment is obeyed.In this paper I claim that not only prosodification processes but also feature spreading is subject to pressure from an alignment constraint, and so is avoided. The case in point is dorsal fricative assimilation in Modern Standard German. Dorsal fricative assimilation does not apply across a compound boundary or to the dorsal fricative of the diminutive suffix -chen, which, though morphologically a suffix, is prosodically a separate phonological word of German (Noske 1990, Iverson & Salmons 1992, Borowsky 1993, Wiese 1996). Bringing Itô & Mester's (in press) notion of crisp alignment to bear on the analysis, I argue that the application of fricative assimilation is constrained by CRISPEDGE(PrWd), which requires the prosodic word to have sharply defined boundaries. Since spreading from a word-final back vowel to the initial dorsal of the following word results in a blurred word edge, it is ruled out, because CRISPEDGE(PrWd) is ranked higher than the constraint governing spreading.

Processing of an obligatory phonotactic restriction outside the focus of the participants' attention was investigated by means of ERPs using (reversed) experimental oddball blocks. Dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA) is a phonotactic constraint in German grammar that is violated in *[ɛx] but not in [ɔx], [ɛ∫], and [ɔ∫]. These stimulus sequences engage the auditory deviance detection mechanism as reflected by the MMN component of the ERP. In Experiment 1 (n = 16), stimuli were contrasted pairwise such that they shared the initial vowel but differed with regard to the fricative. Phonotactically ill-formed deviants elicited stronger MMN responses than well-formed deviants that differed acoustically in the same way from the standard stimulation but did not contain a phonotactic violation. In Experiment 2 (n = 16), stimuli were contrasted such that they differed with regard to the vowel but shared the fricative. MMN was elicited by the vowel change. An additional, later MMN response was observed for the phonotactically ill-formed syllable only. This MMN cannot be attributed to any phonetic or segmental difference between standard and deviant. These findings suggest that implicit phonotactic knowledge is activated and applied in preattentive speech processing.

This paper shows that the Liverpool English dorsal fricative, derived through the lenition of /k/, is subject to place of articulation assimilation, driven by the preceding vowel. This is similar to the vowel-driven aspects of typical perseverative Dorsal Fricative Assimilation (a type of palatalisation), as found, for example, in the German ich-Laut~ach-Laut alternation, where (among other things) a preceding front high or mid vowel is followed by the front dorsal [ç], and other vowels are followed by a back dorsal. However, the majority Liverpool English pattern differs from previously described cases of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in that [ç] only occurs following long front high vowels, while a back dorsal remains after their short congeners. This type of quantity-sensitive pattern in assimilation has not been reported before. We use Centre of Gravity measurements to investigate this pattern of place assimilation, and argue for the use of an innovative normalisation technique for consonant measurements, based on measurements of /k/ aspiration in a linear regression model. We thus both expand the taxonomy of what is known to be possible in phonology and also provide new detail in the description of Liverpool English (including a proposal for the featural analysis of its vowel system).

Abstract Through analyses of Russian voicing assimilation and German dorsal fricative assimilation, this paper argues for a restricted version of structure preservation and a stratal model of Optimality Theory. Structure preservation (Kiparsky 1985) prohibits the creation of allophones early in the phonological computation. The parallel architecture of Optimality Theory undermines the assumptions of structure preservation and the principle has been widely rejected within OT. This paper demonstrates that processes that are both neutralizing and non-structure-preserving and which involve overlapping sets of targets and triggers, such as Russian voicing assimilation, result in a ranking paradox in parallel OT. Purely allophonic processes, such as German fricative assimilation, do not pose the same difficulties. Analyses of both processes are proposed within the framework of Stratal OT. The use of multiple strata eliminates the ranking paradox illustrated in Russian voicing assimilation and accounts for the interaction of German fricative assimilation and umlaut. By using a solution that relies on stratal OT, this analysis also makes predictions about the interaction between non-structure-preserving phonological processes and morphological structure. Whereas there are cases of strict allophony, like German dorsal fricative assimilation, which have been shown to apply prior to the addition of word-level affixes, this account predicts that non-structure-preserving neutralization cannot take place at the earliest level of evaluation but must apply after the Rich Base is filtered to the language-specific inventory and stem-level processes are applied. In the case of Russian, this is substantiated by application of assimilation across clitic boundaries, requiring phrase-level application.

AbstractThis study employs electropalatography to investigate the implementation of nasal assimilation in two Spanish dialects (Argentinian and Cuban) that differ in the realization of word-final nasals as alveolar or velar. 5 speakers of Argentian and 3 speakers of Cuban Spanish were presented with various utterances containing nasals followed by labial, coronal, and dorsal stops and fricatives under two stress conditions. Results revealed that place assimilation of nasals was consistently accompanied by stricture assimilation. The process was generally categorical, that is, the final alveolar or velar nasal adopted the articulation of the following consonant. Nasal + fricative sequences, however, showed a somewhat different behavior: occasional blocking of nasal assimilation before non-coronals, consistent gradient nasal assimilation before coronals (Argentinian), or categorical/gradient strengthening of post-nasal obstruents (Cuban). Overall, the results are largely consistent with Honorof's (Articulatory gestures and Spanish nasal assimilation, Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, 1999) study of Peninsular Spanish and together provide evidence for dialect-specific grammars of assimilation, which nevertheless share certain general principles of gestural organization.