ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following questions: What is assimilation? What are degrees of assimilation (partial and total)? What are directions of assimilation? How are anticipatory, progressive, and reciprocal assimilation different? What are examples of anticipatory assimilation? Progressive assimilation? Reciprocal assimilation? Anticipatory assimilation (also known as regressive assimilation) is how a phoneme is influenced by the phoneme that follows it. In other words, the change in a sound due to anticipating, or preparing for, the sound that follows it. The sorts of anticipatory assimilation that are of most interest in this book are those that are not associated with the historical development of North American English and subsequently appear in writing, but those processes which occur only during spoken production.
