PROCESSING OF ILLEGAL CONSONANT CLUSTERS - A CASE OF PERCEPTUAL ASSIMILATION

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clust ers that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically , word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates-which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant / I/-as being dental stops. However, as information for the /l/ became a vailable in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the in itial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme mon itoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line duri ng speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. Thes e results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the nativ e phonological system.