Variable assimilation of English word-final /n/: electropalatographic evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The phonetic realization of the English word-final alveolar nasal /n/ is known to be highly variable. Previous articulatory work has reported both gradient and categorical nasal place assimilation including considerable between-speaker differences. This work, however, has largely focused on a small subset of place contexts (namely, preceding velar /k, ɡ/) in a limited number of English varieties. The present article uses electropalatography to study the articulatory realization of /n/ in a wider range of phonetic contexts and read texts as produced by three speakers of Canadian English. The results reveal considerable inter- and intra-speaker differences in the rates of assimilation. Consistent with previous work, we observed a high degree of variation, both gradient and categorical, before velars. Substantial rates of assimilation were also observed before labials, where the process is unexpected from the point of view of gestural phonology but predicted by traditional phonological analyses. The variation in the place and stricture of /n/ before coronals was more limited and typically gradient. Finally, some differences were observed across the text conditions, with more assimilation occurring in carrier sentences than in the read passage and, to a more limited extent, in function than in content words.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".