Regarding what they have in common in Korean and English consonant deletions, I claim that listeners' perception is at the heart of determining factors. For Korean, this rationale departs from the previous analyses relying upon syllabification directi ...

Regarding what they have in common in Korean and English consonant deletions, I claim that listeners' perception is at the heart of determining factors. For Korean, this rationale departs from the previous analyses relying upon syllabification directions, feature priorities, and the sonority-oriented constraints. For English, it also objects to the traditional study of t/d-deletion, represented by Labov (1997) and Guy (1997) to identify phonological conditions like sonority and syllabification. Next, I claim that the disparity between the two languages derives from the effect of constraints to be adjacent to vowels operates to prohibit triple- and word-final double consonants. For another, postvocalic obstruents are unreleased. In Korean both constraints outrank others, whereas in English they are lower ranked. On the thorniest issue of variation, it is proposed that in Korean it derives from the narrow margins between the inherent perceptibility of the contending segments. Meanwhile, for English, the floating nature of faithfulness of input with respect to the magnitude of syntagmatic similarity accounts for the optionality.