Variation and assimilation in German - Institut für Phonetik

552 COENEN, ZWITSERLOOD, AND BOÈLTE
tolerance of the word recognition system for regular variation: Lexical
access is not blocked when presented with a ‘‘mismatching’’ feature,
provided that the context segment shares this feature.
No such effect is found for the progressive case of coronal place
assimilation. As we argued, this agrees fully with the facts for German, but
it presents a challenge for the application of underspecication theory to
the speech perception domain. Whatever rule prevents segments that are
unspecied for [coronal] to surface in an assimilated way at word onset, it
cannot be a general rule, blocking all variation at word onset. For we did
nd effects at word onset, for legal progressive voice assimilation. Before
evaluating the consequences of the results for the predictions that were
formulated before Experiment 1, we present data from an experiment with
words presented out of context.
EXPERIMENT 2: CROSSMODAL FORM PRIMING
IN ISOLATION
Experiment 2 investigated the material from Experiment 1, this time
presented in isolation. According to a strict view of underspecication, it
should not matter whether context is present or not, but for some accounts,
context is important (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996; Gow, 2000). The
empirical evidence is less clear cut. On the one hand, both Gaskell &
Marslen-Wilson (1996) and Gow (2000) found signicant priming with
assimilated tokens when the critical post-assimilation context was removed
(e.g., Sandra will only eat lean/ a leam). Of course the presence of sentence
context might have cued participants to the possibility of assimilated
words. On the other hand, no facilitation was found for assimilated items
presented in isolation (Marslen-Wilson et al., 1995), even when the release
of the critical consonantal burst was cut off. Our Experiment 2 served to
ascertain whether assimilation in German requires context to be tolerated
in speech recognition. As in Experiment 1, there was a complete change in
phoneme status between unchanged and changed words.
It turned out to be impossible to create intelligible items by cutting out
critical words from their sentence contexts. Thus, a new recording was
made. We are aware of differences between words spoken in context and
in isolation, such that data from Experiment 1 and 2 should only be
compared with necessary caution. A forced-choice phonetic decision
pretest was carried out to assess the discriminability of the stimuli, this
time in the absence of a context word.
Pretest
The design was the same as in the rst pretest, except that no pseudoword
pairs were included. Changed and unchanged test and control words of all