Abstract
Two experiments examined whether perceptual recovery from Korean
consonant-cluster simplification is based on language-specific phonological knowledge. In
tri-consonantal C1C2C3 sequences such as /lkt/ and /lpt/ in Seoul Korean, either C1 or C2
can be completely deleted. Seoul Koreans monitored for C2 targets (/p/ or / k/, deleted or
preserved) in the second word of a two-word phrase with an underlying /l/-C2-/t/ sequence.
In Experiment 1 the target-bearing words had contextual lexical-semantic support. Listeners
recovered deleted targets as fast and as accurately as preserved targets with both Word and
Intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries between the two words. In Experiment 2, contexts were
low-pass filtered. Listeners were still able to recover deleted targets as well as preserved
targets in IP-boundary contexts, but better with physically-present targets than with deleted
targets in Word-boundary contexts. This suggests that the benefit of having target acoustic-
phonetic information emerges only when higher-order (contextual and phrase-boundary)
information is not available. The strikingly efficient recovery of deleted phonemes with
neither acoustic-phonetic cues nor contextual support demonstrates that language-specific
phonological knowledge, rather than language-universal perceptual processes which rely
on fine-grained phonetic details, is employed when the listener perceives the results of a
continuous-speech process in which reduction is phonetically complete.
