assimilation (linguistics)

Assimilation is a typical sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs. A common example of assimilation would be "don't be silly" where the and in "don't" become and , where said naturally in many accents and discourse styles. A related process is coarticulation where one segment influences another to produce an allophonic variation, such as vowels acquiring the feature [nasal] before nasal consonants when the velum opens prematurely or becoming labialised as in "boot". This article will describe both processes under the term, assimilation.
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