Variation and assimilation in German: Consequences for lexical access and representation

The consequences of surface variation in speech on lexical access have rece ntly received considerable attention. The lexical system is intolerant to m ismatch between input and lexical representation, but an exception is phono logically regular variation. One example is assimilation of consonants that adopt the place of articulation of adjacent consonants in fast speech. Dat a are presented from crossmodal form priming experiments in German on regre ssive and progressive assimilation at word boundaries. The results show tha t some, but not all forms of lawful variation are tolerated by the lexical system. The consequences of these findings for psycholinguistic and linguis tic models, some of which incorporate explanations for regular variation, a re discussed.