2007) Phonological context effects for voicing and devoicing in French

We examine occurrences of categorical assimi-lation (neutralizations) in French, the perception of voiced and unvoiced word-final obstruents in dif-ferent phonological contexts. We first show the categorical nature of the alternation (Exp. 1), sup-ported in Exp. 2 by perceptual categorization data. In Exp. 3, the interpretation of this first percept appears to be corrected in certain contexts, induc-ing compensation. We argue that context effects are phonological in this case, rather than auditory or phonetic. We conclude that linguistic knowl-edge of alternations is necessary in compensation for categorical assimilation