Assimilation and anticipation in word perception

Words in connected speech are often assimilated to subsequent words. Some property of that upcoming word may then be determined in advance; these advance assimilatory cues may facilitate perception of that word. A gating experiment was conducted in Dutch, studying anticipatory voice assimilation between plosives, in 24 two-word combinations. In Dutch, voicing in a word-final plosive can only be caused by anticipatory assimilation to the next, voiced initial plosive, e.g. “rie[db]lint”. Voiced and unvoiced variants of final and initial plosives were cross-spliced. Responses for assimilated, voiced-final stimuli show a strong bias to voiced-initial responses, as predicted. Even at longer gates in the hybrid condition “rie[dp]lint”, after hearing the unvoiced initial plosive, listeners often came up with a voicedinitial response, with high confidence. Hence, advance phonological ‘voiced-initial’ cues were often stronger than acoustic ‘unvoiced-initial’ cues. These gating results suggest that listeners use advance assimilatory cues in word perception.