Compensation for French Liquid Deletion During Auditory Sentence Processing

Phonological rules change the surface realization of words. Listeners undo these changes in order to retrieve the canonical word form. We investigate this so-called compensation for a French deletion rule, i.e. liquid deletion. This rule optionally deletes the final consonant of a word-final obstruent-liquid cluster. It can apply both before consonants and before vowels, but its application is about twice as frequent before consonants. Using a word detection task, we find an overall relatively low rate of compensation, which we argue is due to the relatively high perceptual salience of the rule. We also observe a clear effect of context, though: listeners compensate more than twice as often for a deleted liquid before a consonant than before a vowel. This is evidence that compensation involves fine-grained knowledge about the probability of the rule’s application in different contexts.