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When my 6-year old daughter spells words phonetically, she regularly drops final 'n' at ends of syllables, after vowels, like "rabo" for "rainbow", "lach" for "lunch".

This made me wonder, are we all dropping the distinct /n/ sound in these words?

Is this a regular phenomena in American English, and what's the name for it?

wrschneider
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We don't "drop" the /n/, but it does undergo a change - English nasal consonants assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant. Thus rainbow is pretty much always pronounced rai[mb]ow, raincoat is rai[ŋk]oat, etc.

As for how this explains your daughter's spelling, consonant clusters are "difficult" in language acquisition, and young children very commonly simplify them. In addition, syllable codas are less psychologically prominent than syllable onsets (and some very young children just delete them across the board). Here, my guess is that the nasal assimilation process makes it particularly hard to perceive the nasal as a distinct phoneme from the subsequent consonant, so your daughter leaves it out from the spelling.

By the way, there's another major allophonic change with nasals in English that is worth mentioning: they nasalize the preceding vowel. So we pronounce lunch as [lʌ̃ntʃ]. This is hard to perceive, but if you record yourself saying (for example) met [mɛt] and men [mɛ̃n], then clip off the final consonants from the recordings, you'll hear a distinct difference in what is left.

Though I've never read anything about this, I'd speculate that in fast speech - because the vowel is so much longer and more salient than the nasal consonant - most of what alerts us to the presence of the /n/ (perceptually speaking) in a word like lunch is the nasalization of the vowel.

alcas
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  • Everything in this post is true (except perhaps the last paragraph—the vowel nasalisation varies a lot even within American English, and some dialects and speakers only nasalise their vowels very slightly; the nasal itself is more likely to be the main indicator still, I would think) … but to me, a child should most likely have mastered non-complex (coda) clusters like [mb] and [ntʃ] by the age of six. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 22 '13 at 22:04
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    I'm sure she has mastered them in spoken production/perception, but the fact that the nasal in the cluster isn't psychologically prominent might still be making her leave it out in spelling, no? – alcas Oct 23 '13 at 01:45
  • Sorry, I completely missed the word ‘spells’ in the question—I read it as if the girl was pronouncing the words without the nasals! – Janus Bahs Jacquet Oct 23 '13 at 08:46
  • +1 Nice post. [But it's only alveolar nasals in English that freely assimilate. Labial /m/ and velar /ŋ/ do not!] – Araucaria - Him Jul 11 '21 at 13:53
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Do you know any English words with an /mb/ coda cluster? – Araucaria - Him Jul 11 '21 at 13:55
  • @Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Can’t think of any that can’t alternatively be pronounced with a reduced coda /m/, but loan words like iamb, rhumb, corymb, rhomb are usually pronounced with /mb/ in my experience. // Non-alveolar nasals do sometimes assimilate, though less freely than alveolar ones, e.g., come closer being commonly [kʌŋ ˈkloʊsər] in rapid speech. Before labiodentals, the assimilation of /m/ is quite free, e.g., came first [keɪɱ ˈfərst]. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 11 '21 at 14:18
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I did a search on this, and the closest I could dig up is Money-Smoothing.

Money-smoothing is a process occurring for some Wisconsinites where intervocalic /n/ is deleted when it comes before an unstressed /i/ producing a nasalized diphthong...

From the comments, I'm getting that her dialect influence would be upstate New York? According to the article, that isn't in the area for Money-Smoothing. However, it is a linguistically-related area. Both upstate New York and Wisconsin are in the dialect area of Inland North American English. So it seems to me quite possible that Money-Smoothing has started to spread throught the INAE dialect region (without performing the courtesy of informing Wikipedia).

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Regardless of location, Money-Smoothing does appear to be the name for that particular change in phonology.

Then again, it could just be a childhood lisp. My youngest daughter spoke with a slight lisp until about 4th grade or so. It happens.

T.E.D.
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  • I noticed that. DC though is a bit of a transient place. People there tend to be from all over, and often go back where they came from. So I'd still like an answer on a possible connection with Wisconsinites. The "native" accent there is AAVE, I believe, but most folks who put down DC on the internet are actually living in the Virginia suburbs. – T.E.D. Oct 22 '13 at 15:10
  • both from upstate NY, sorry. – wrschneider Oct 22 '13 at 15:32
  • @wrschneider99 Aha! This actually makes sense now (see edit). My suspicon of the location turned out to be well-founded. – T.E.D. Oct 22 '13 at 15:48
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    Does she leave out when spelling words like "money", though? My impression was that she leaves it out when it's adjacent to another consonant, which is not the environment for Money-smoothing. – alcas Oct 22 '13 at 16:14
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I doubt many people lose the n in lunch. That one seems extreme. But the one in rainbow is often an 'm', because you nasalize for the n, but your lips meet before you can hear the tongue reach its target. The 'n' in 'conversation' becomes a nasal color this way, too, instead of a real 'n' and may become a light 'm'. The effect can even eat whole related sounds between the 'n' and the next positional goal -- 'sandpaper' -> 'sampaper'.

This may be a more common middle American form of elision, because we really don't like to hurry our sounds, but we are still impatient to spit out our words. Then again, it fits into a very general pattern where a following sound colors the sound before it and shifts it into the position for the follower. So I have my doubts.

Jon Jay Obermark
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    What exactly do you mean by “before you can hear the vellum touch”? The vellum can only be heard in clusters where a simultaneous nasobuccal closure is released nasally (as in [dn] or [bm]); otherwise, it is silent. Moreover, when nasalising the vowel in anticipation of the /n/, the vellum moves away from the back of the pharynx, so it's ‘letting go’, rather than ‘touching’. Nasal assimilation is one of the most universally attested sound changes there are; it is by no means specifically American or even English. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 01 '14 at 01:16
  • Snipe less. I meant you start saying the b before you stop nasalizing, resulting in an 'm'. And I agree that 'particularly' was a poor choice of words, when I only meant we have contradictory habits that might make this more common for us than other English speakers -- we drawl, and we try particularly hard not to drop sounds from words, but at the same time we rush.

    Still -- snipe less.

     – Jon Jay Obermark May 01 '14 at 01:33