Place assimilation is not the result of gestural overlap: evidence from Korean and English

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a s,ingle gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction. Varieties of place assimilation fall into two major types. The first type includes canonical patterns such as morphophonemic alternations (la) and historical changes (lb):