Assimilation and anticipation in continuous spoken word recognition

English coronal place assimilation is one of many productive phonological p rocesses that change the phonological form of words. It may, for example. c ause speakers to pronounce green as something approximating [grin] or [grim ] in different contexts. The present work examines how listeners recognize words that have undergone this modification. Current accounts are broadly d ifferentiated by two issues: (1) whether listeners generally recognize word s that have undergone word-final, single-feature modification. and (2) how context effects in the perception of assimilated speech are interpreted. Ex periment 1 employs form priming to demonstrate that listeners tolerate sing le-feature mismatch resulting from both phonologically plausible and phonol ogically implausible word form modification when recognizing words heard in context. Experiments 2 and 3 employ phoneme monitoring and negative rhyme priming paradigms, respectively, to demonstrate that listeners use assimila tion to anticipate upcoming context. Evidence for anticipation is contraste d with claims that listeners use context to regressively infer the underlyi ng form of place assimilated segments. (C) 2001 Academic Press.