Abstract
Phonetic segmentation is a useful fiction layered over the speech continuum which provides linguists with an abstraction on which to base their generalizations about the sound system of a given language. However, there are phenomena whose nature is obscured rather than revealed by a theoretical perspective which essentially rests on a metaphor for speech as (alphabet-based) writing (speech as a string of phones).
One such area is coarticulation and connected speech processes in the most general sense, the most extreme cases of which result in the integration of key perceptual cues from what would otherwise be separate segments into one. Various terms have been coined to describe these processes, including articulatory prosody (Kohler 1999) and parallel articulation (Machač and Zíková 2015).
Intuitively, they often consist of a superimposition of a consonant's key distinctive feature or features like nasality or labiality on a vocalic or sonorant support, but they can also be less straightforward, as suggested by Kohler's (1999) example of glottalization in nasals as a surrogate / parallel articulation of alveolar stops in German. [...] See attachment for full abstract.