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Yun, Gwanhi. 2010. Do Korean Speakers Perceptually Restore Assimilated Words in English? Korean Journal of Linguistics, 35-3, 767-795. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether Korean L2 listeners activate L2 speakers' underlying phonemes from the assimilated ones specifically caused by English coronal place assimilation. Recently much of psycholinguistic research has found that L1 listeners activate speakers' intended forms even from the fully assimilated forms (Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson 1996, 1998; Gow 2002, 2003). Such perception studies obtained interesting results that native speakers could recover the underlying coronals from the fully assimilated coronals as well as from the partially assimilated noncoronals. Given the results for L1 speakers, the current study seeks to test the possibility of L2 listeners' recoverability of L1 speaker's intended word forms from the fully assimilated forms. Results from both identification test and ABX discrimination test showed that Korean L2 listeners substantially restored the underlying coronals from the assimilated words as well as noncronals although their recoverability was lower than native English speakers‘. Based on the observation that there are no significant acoustic differences between assimilated and unassimilated noncoronals, these results indicate that L2 listeners might be able to activate the underlying phonemes through phonological inferencing (Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson 1998). Based on the results, we also suggest a novel optimality theoretic account of phonological inferencing via perceptual constraints. (Daegu University)