Variation and assimilation in German - Institut für Phonetik

540 COENEN, ZWITSERLOOD, AND BOÈLTE
changed words ( a weim, from wein, wine) as a function of the viability of
the following context. So, available data on the importance of a licensing
context provide support in favour of and against underspecication.
EXPERIMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS
In the present study, we manipulated contextual viability or appropriateness,
the legality of the change and the direction of assimilation within the
same experiment, which constitutes an improvement on the methodology
of earlier studies. Assimilation was always complete, resulting in a change
in phoneme status (see note 2). We tested assimilated items in context
(Experiment 1) and in isolation (Experiment 2). Our experiments
expanded on the conditions under which assimilation has been investigated
so far.
Contextual viability or licensing. As in most of the above experiments,
we presented unchanged and changed words, in viable and unviable
contexts. A context was viable when a segment in the context word
contained the feature that triggered the change in the segment involved in
assimilation. An example is wort (word) changed to a worp before mal
(just), with [m] containing the feature [labial]. The change was unviable
when the context segment was incongruent with the change, as in worp
before kurz (briey), with [k] containing the feature [velar]). Unlike the
cases used by Marslen-Wilson et al. (1995), assimilation never resulted in
identical segments in assimilated and context words.
Type of assimilation. So far, only assimilation of place of articulation
was discussed. We tested two types of assimilation: Assimilation of place of
articulation, and of voice. In place assimilation, a coronal feature can be
realised as labial or velar, if an adjacent segment contains the labial or
velar feature. Similarly, a voiced consonant can lose the feature [voiced] in
the context of a segment which is voiceless (see below).
Direction of assimilation. We also varied the direction of assimilation,
which can be regressive or progressive. So far, only regressive assimilation
has been investigated, with a context segment triggering a featural change
in the preceding segment. In progressive assimilation a featural change is
triggered in a following segment (e.g., a hemp for hemt, shirt or a lebmde for
lebnde, living). As the examples show, progressive place assimilation is
attested word-internally in German, not across word boundaries (Kohler,
1995). Our experiments were designed to test the general idea of
underspecication, as well as assumptions about a special status of wordonsets
in word recognition (Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). We