Restoration of deleted and assimilated consonant sequences in conversational French speech: effects of preceding and following context

The present study was designed to test the effects of preceding and following context on the restoration of deleted and assimilated consonant sequences in conversational French speech. Consonant restoration was found to be enhanced by lexical information and by the different sources of information contained in the breath group. The fundamental contribution of breath-group information suggests that the breath group, which is a production unit in conversational speech, might be a perception unit. Interestingly, the results also appear to be in line with Lindblom's claim (1990, 1996) that speakers adapt their utterances to the listeners' needs and maintain sufficient contrast for promoting correct lexical access.

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