JLP 2 (2011), 487–523 1836-6346/11/02–487 DOI 10.1515/LABPHON.2011.018 © Walter de Gruyter Spanish nasal assimilation revisited: A cross-dialect electropalatographic study* ALEXEI KOCHETOV and LAURA COLANTONI University of Toronto Abstract This study employs electropalatography to investigate the implementation of nasal assimilation in two Spanish dialects (Argentinian and Cuban) that differ in the realization of word-fnal nasals as alveolar or velar. 5 speakers of Argentian and 3 speakers of Cuban Spanish were presented with various utterances containing nasals followed by labial, coronal, and dorsal stops and fricatives under two stress conditions. Results revealed that place assimilation of nasals was consistently ac- companied by stricture assimilation. The process was generally categorical, that is, the fnal alveolar or velar nasal adopted the articulation of the following con- sonant. Nasal + fricative sequences, however, showed a somewhat different be- havior: occasional blocking of nasal assimilation before non-coronals, consistent gradient nasal assimilation before coronals (Argentinian), or categorical/gradient strengthening of post-nasal obstruents (Cuban). Overall, the results are largely consistent with Honorof’s (1999) study of Peninsular Spanish and together pro- vide evidence for dialect-specifc grammars of assimilation, which nevertheless share certain general principles of gestural organization. 1. Introduction In their seminal paper presented at LabPhon 1, Browman and Goldstein (1990) proposed to account for various continuous speech phenomena using a restricted set of simple operations over dynamically-specifed articulatory gestures. Much of the subsequent work in the framework of Articulatory Phonology, and more gener- ally in the feld of laboratory phonology, has focused on further empirical testing and theoretical refnement of this proposal, particularly with respect to phonological and phonetic processes involving assimilation. A number of recent articulatory studies of assimilatory phenomena in various languages provide evidence for two major types of gestural operations. The frst type is inherently gradient, continuous, and dependent on speech rate and style. It involves temporal sliding of gestures belonging to different articulators (e.g., the tongue tip and the lips for alveolars and Unauthenticated Download Date | 7/19/18 5:24 AM