Title
On place assimilation in sibilant sequences—Comparing French and English
Abstract
Two parallel acoustic analyses were performed for French and English sibilant sequences, based on comparably structured read-speech corpora. They comprised all sequences of voiced and voiceless alveolar and postalveolar sibilants that can occur across word boundaries in the two languages, as well as the individual alveolar and postalveolar sibilants, combined with preceding or following labial consonants across word boundaries. The individual sibilants provide references in order to determine type and degree of place assimilation in the sequences. Based on duration and centre-of-gravity measurements that were taken for each sibilant and sibilant sequence, we found clear evidence for place assimilation not only for English, but also for French. In both languages the assimilation manifested itself gradually in the time as well as in the frequency domain. However, while in English assimilation occurred strictly regressively and primarily towards postalveolar, French assimilation was solely towards postalveolar, but in both regressive and progressive directions. Apart from these basic differences, the degree of assimilation in French and English was independent of simultaneous voice assimilation but varied considerably between the individual speakers. Overall, the context-dependent and speaker-specific assimilation patterns match well with previous findings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.wocn.2011.04.003
Journal of Phonetics
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
39
3
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0095-4470
5
0.61
References 
Authors
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oliver Niebuhr1388.07
Meghan Clayards2162.62
Christine Meunier31910.61
Leonardo Lancia4133.95