Does English Coronal Place Assimilation Create Lexical Ambiguity?

The purpose of this study was to determine how potential lexical ambiguity produced by place assimilation is resolved. Four cross-modal form priming experiments using primes in sentential contexts were performed. In the first 2, prime items had underlyingly coronal offsets (e.g., right) with assimilated noncoronal place. The primes were judged to be perceptually ambiguous (between right and ripe) in Experiment 1 and noncoronal (ripe) in Experiment 2 in off-line testing. In Experiment 3, primes were replaced with corresponding underlyingly noncoronal items (ripe). In all 3 experiments, participants showed selective priming for the underlying form of the prime. A 4th form priming experiment using the gated tokens of priming stimuli used in Experiment 2 examined the role of postlexical context on this process. In this experiment, participants showed priming for both underlying and surface forms of the prime.