The Relationship between Production and Cognitive Processing of Liaison

This article reviews the state of the art on cognitive processing of French liaison in the domains of both production and perception. Corpus studies in recent decades have demonstrated that liaison is a highly variable phenomenon; psycholinguistic data have shown that the speakers compensate for the lack of lexical-syllabic alignment based on bottom up (acoustic, phonotactic) and top-down information (phrasal context). We sketch a plan for future research in the neuro- cognition of liaison phenomena for our understanding of how the speakers process different types of liaisons in context.