Connected Speech Processes

This video just has a plain transcript, not time-aligned to the videoConnected speech forms are highly variable as the result of a number of processes that apply to consonants and vowels. This video will present some common connected speech processes with examples.
In order to fully describe a connected speech process, we need to know both the phonemic form as well as the surface phonetic form. We can then compare the two forms to each other, and describe the changes that we observe in terms of processes.
In order to describe the process that has taken place, we first need to recognize the sounds that it has applied to. For example here, the phonemic form of “green men” has an alveolar nasal followed by a bilabial nasal. However, we see that in the surface phonetic form, the alveolar nasal has become bilabial as well.
In order to fully describe a connected speech process, we need to know both the phonemic form as well as the surface phonetic production.
Some of these connected speech processes affect consonants, other affect vowels, and some affect both consonants and vowels. We’ll touch on each of these processes in turn, starting with assimilation.
Assimilation is a process by which a sound becomes more like an adjacent sound. It can effect any of the three articulatory parameters of consonants, voice, place or manner.
Here we have examples of each of these kinds of assimilation. In each case, the phonemic form the phrase is given followed by the phonetic realization. The assimilated sound and the conditioning environment are highlighted in red. In order to describe the assimilation, we need to identify the sound that has changed, and report the change that has occurred. For example, the voiced alveolar fricative /z/ in the phonemic form of the word “is” in “is Pete going?” is realized as a voiceless alveolar fricative, because it has assimilated in voicing to the following sound /p/.
Similar assimilation processes have taken place in each other other examples provided here. Pause the video and describe the assimilation that has taken place in each case.
We can also describe assimilations according to the position of the conditioning environment with respect to the sound that is assimilating, that is, whether it is the conditioning sound that comes before or after the sound that assimilates.
Here, the conditioning sounds have been highlighted in blue, while the assimilated sound is highlighted in red. In the perseverative assimilation examples, the predictive environments appear before the sound that is assimilated, while the predictive environments in anticipatory assimilation, appears after the sound that is assimilated.
Now let’s return to our “green men” example from earlier. This is an example of anticipatory place assimilation of the alveolar nasal /n/ to the bilabial place of the /m/ that follows it.
Again, the deletion is defined with relation to the phonemic form. So here we see that two sounds have been deleted from the phonemic form in order to result in the surface phonetic form that was produced. Notice that Sometimes when vowels are deleted adjacent consonants become syllabic, meaning that they serve as the nucleus of the syllable.
Consonant lenition, also known as weakening, is a process by which consonants become less strongly occluded. This might mean a phonemic stop that is realized as a fricative or an approximant in the phonetic form.
For example, a phonemic /g/ may be realized as either an approximant [ɰ] (as on the left) or a fricative [ɣ] (as on the right).
The final process we’re considering here is vowel reduction, where the quality of a vowel becomes more centralized with respect to the expected quality of the vowel in the citation form. This diagram shows a representation of the IPA vowel vowel chart. The purple ovoid near the centre represents a reduced vowel space that we might observe if we were to plot first and second formant values of reduced vowels. We can also represent vowel reduction in transcription, as in the examples here. The reduced vowels are highlighted in blue. Reduction of vowels tends to occur in unstressed or otherwise non-prominent syllables.