Individual speech sounds are modified by the phonetic environment in which they are found in connected speech. In this book, the term accommodation is used generically for any and all articulatory modifications that arise from the phonetic environment. The term assimilation is used for accommodation that crosses phonemic boundaries, and coarticulation is used for sub-phonemic accommodations. Accommodation occurs not due to laziness, but through these forces: (1) the fundamental constraints on producing a number of segments in rapid, connected succession, and (2) the efficiency of speech production – not producing gestures, or extending gestures beyond what is required for the production of highly intelligible speech. Accommodations might be informally called shortcuts, and some shortcuts are required by physical constraints and some are not; others are required by the grammatical rules of the language in question, defined by language-specific rules.
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