Where does assimilation collide?

In Piaget's account of cognitive development, assimilation is the process of taking in new information and fitting it into a mental structure, or schema, that the person already has. A child who calls every four-legged animal a dog is assimilating a new animal into an existing schema. Piaget paired assimilation with its opposite, accommodation, in which the schema itself is altered to fit information that will not fit as it stands, and learning moves forward as the two work together. He set out this pairing in The Origins of Intelligence in Children. The referent here is a mental operation on an internal schema, not a minority group joining a wider society, a sound shifting toward its neighbor, or food being built into the body.[1]

Unit

New input fitted into an existing mental schema

Recovery means

Accommodation is the paired process: when input will not fit, the schema itself is changed rather than the input

Measured by

Inferred from how a child responds to new objects and tasks in Piagetian clinical interviews and conservation tasks

In the sociology of migration, assimilation is the process by which an immigrant or minority group gradually takes on the language, customs, and identity of the dominant society and becomes less distinct from it over time. The classical view, drawn from Robert Park's idea of a race-relations cycle and Milton Gordon's account of its separate dimensions, treated this as a broadly one-directional path toward the mainstream. Later work questioned that single path: Portes and Zhou's The New Second Generation proposed segmented assimilation, in which different groups move toward different segments of society, some faring well and others less so. The word here names a social and cultural process for a group, studied across generations. It has nothing to do with a schema in a child's mind, a sound changing shape, or a nutrient entering a cell.[3][2]

Unit

A group's movement toward the culture of the dominant society, across generations

Recovery means

Not a reversible mechanism; researchers instead track whether groups converge on, or diverge from, the mainstream over time

Measured by

Assessed with generational data on language, intermarriage, residence, schooling, and income for immigrant and minority groups

In phonology, assimilation is a process in which a speech sound becomes more like a neighboring sound, so that the two are easier to produce in sequence. A common example is the way the n in input often shifts toward an m before the p, giving something like imput, because the lips are already closing for the p. Jun's chapter Place assimilation analyzes cases like this, where a consonant takes on the place of articulation of the sound next to it. The change can be partial or total, and it can reach forward or backward to the triggering sound. The referent is a pattern in the sound system of a language, not a mental schema, a group joining a society, or matter absorbed by an organism.[4]

Unit

A sound shifting to match a feature of an adjacent sound

Recovery means

Not applicable; it is a regular sound pattern, described rather than reversed

Measured by

Identified by phonologists from patterns in transcribed speech and confirmed with acoustic and articulatory measurement