Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 94th episode.

In English, sometimes two adjacent sounds affect one another so much they join and basically become a different sound.

This is an example of something called assimilation.

Assimulation happens naturally, and, like many aspects of spoken language,

individual native speakers are not often aware

of doing this.

Today I'm going to talk about the D sound becoming a J sound and the T sound becoming a C-H sound.

This occurs when those sounds are followed by a Y sound.

It can occur both within words and across word boundaries.

When it occurs within high frequency words, it can become so common that the assimilated sound becomes the norm,

and dictionaries will show this newer pronunciation.

Examples are the words picture and procedure.

Can you hear the C-H sound, in the word picture and the J sound, j, in the word picture and the j sound j in the word procedure once upon a time the word picture was pronounced with a t sound followed by a long u sound

the long you sound you i hope know, begins with a Y sound. Similarly, the word procedure,

was properly pronounced with a D sound followed by the long U. Now, pictur has become picture,

and procedure has become procedure.

Here are a few more examples.

Virtue, nature, graduate, and individual.

What can make this difficult to grasp is that it also occurs across word boundaries.

It happens commonly when the first word ends in a D sound or a T sound, and the next word is either

the word you or your.

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