What is regressive (anticipatory) assimilation?

• A. A sound becomes more like a following sound.
• B. A sound becomes more like a preceding sound.
• C. A sound changes its place of articulation in isolation.
• D. A sound is deleted in a word.

Answer: (A)

Regressive (anticipatory) assimilation is when the articulation of an earlier sound shifts to become more like a sound that comes after it in the sequence. It’s called anticipatory because the influence comes from the upcoming sound and the speaker’s articulators adjust in advance of producing it.

A common example is nasalization of a vowel before a nasal consonant: the vowel preceding the nasal often becomes nasalized because the following nasal spreads its nasal quality backward onto the vowel. So in rapid speech you might hear the vowel in a word before an /n/ or /m/ taken on a nasal quality, even though the nasal sound hasn’t been fully formed yet.

This differs from progressive assimilation, where the influence goes forward to affect a following sound, and from changes in isolation or deletion, which aren’t about the neighboring sound influencing the current one.