A perception experiment with Japanese listeners is conducted to investigate the nature of place shift phenomenon that was previously found with French and English listeners. Hallé et al. [1] showed that unattested consonant sequences /tl, dl/ are perceptually repaired to form grammatically acceptable consonant clusters /kl, gl/ in the listeners' native language. In this study, a similar experiment with Japanese listeners, whose mother tongue lacks the onset clusters altogether, is conducted.

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... result explicitly shows that the place shift phenomenon ought not to be interpreted in relation to the topdown phonotactic feedback. Rather, I will argue that both labial and velar shift reflect an autonomous, signal-driven process. As such, language specificity in speech perception must reside in the listeners' cue weighting, rather than encoded linguistic knowledge.