assimilation

Short definition from Wiktionary

Noun

1. 1
   The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.
2. 2
   The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
3. 3
   The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
4. 4
   A sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs.
5. 5
   The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.