Perceptual Biases in Consonant Deletion

We demonstrate that adult English speakers make use of perceptual principles in medial consonant cluster deletion. Cross-linguistically, consonant cluster simplification via deletion is more likely apply to the first consonant rather than the second consonant (if both consonants are of equal sonority). Adult native English speakers, were given a two-alternative forced-choice task in which either C1 or C2 of a C1C2 cluster was deleted. When C1 and C2 were of equal sonority, participants selected C1 significantly more often than chance, but when sonority of C1 was greater than C2, participants selected C1 at chance. These results support a theory in which biases towards phonetically grounded processes shape the crosslinguistic distribution of phonological processes.