Variation and assimilation in German - Institut für Phonetik

542 COENEN, ZWITSERLOOD, AND BOÈLTE
EXPERIMENT 1: CROSSMODAL FORM PRIMING
IN SENTENCE CONTEXT
We investigated assimilation of adjacent segments in sentential context by
means of a crossmodal identical form priming paradigm. As in the
experiments by Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson (1996, 1998), assimilated and
unchanged words were embedded in sentences, and the targets for the
lexical decision task were the visually presented unchanged words.
Materials for the experiment were pretested for discriminability of
changed and unchanged words.
Method
Participants. Ninety-six native speakers of German were tested in the
main experiment, twenty in the pretest. They were mainly students of
Münster University, participating for course credits.
Materials. Six different material groups were constructed, one for each
combination of the factors Type of Assimilation (regressive and
progressive place, and progressive voice) and Legality (legal vs. illegal
change). A sample set of materials is given in Appendix A. There were 18
targets within each of these material groups. Six primes, embedded in a
sentence context, were constructed for each target. Primes were either
unchanged (wort) or changed (worp). Changed and unchanged primes
were followed by words that either licensed the change ( a worp mal, viable
context) or not (worp kurz, unviable context). The two baseline conditions
contained unchanged (e.g., blatt, sheet) and changed (e.g., blapp) control
words, which were unrelated to the targets of crossmodal priming but
shared the critical segment. Changed control words always appeared in an
unviable context. Thus, we had a two (unchanged £ changed) by three
(viable, unviable, control) within design for each of the six material groups.
Prime words were presented in sentential context. The rst context
sentence was a lead-in, the second sentence contained the critical prime
word. Within each material group, test and control primes were matched
for frequency and number of syllables. Changed and unchanged segments
were all plosives ([p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g]) or nasals ([m], [n], [ng]). Prime
words were nouns or adjectives, with one or two syllables. They were never
separated from the critical context word by a prosodic boundary, because
assimilation usually does not cross such boundaries (Holst & Nolan, 1996).
Although the speaker read the material with normal and uent speaking
rate, care was taken that the change was always complete, that is, a
different segment was spoken in assimilated and unchanged conditions. In
no case did the changed segment result in a real word: All changed words
were pseudowords.