Primary and secondary cues to voice assimilation in French and Slovenian

Several important issues in voice assimilation have been recently revisited. In particular, is it gradient or categorical? Distributional analyses of the voicing ratio in assimilating vs. neutral contexts conducted on French data have yielded somewhat discrepant results, yet suggesting that assimilation is categorical and optional at the same time. In this study, we compare between-word voice assimilation data reported for French with similar data collected in Slovenian: Is assimilation stronger in one language and how categorical is it in each language? We also compare voice assimilation in the two languages for secondary cues to voicing, such as closure duration, and compare the assimilation produced for words vs. nonwords. We find that voice assimilation is more categorical and occurs more often in Slovenian than French, that some secondary cues to voicing resist assimilation in French but not in Slovenian, and that assimilation is similar for words and nonwords in both languages.