This paper investigates whether native English, Korean, and Chinese listeners show language-specific compensation mechanisms for phonological assimilation processes. To this end, two different assimilation rules, obstruent nasalization and coronal place assimilation, were tested. Fourteen Korean listeners, eleven English listeners, and fourteen Chinese listeners listened to 540 items of Korean stimuli and 540 items of English stimuli prompted by the PsychoPy software. For each item, a target token was presented with one of three contexts (i.e. no change, unviable change, and viable change). The participants indicated whether a target token was the same as the first syllable or the first word in a compound word (e.g. “main”, “mai[m] body”). The results of detection rates showed that Korean listeners compensated for nasalization in a highly context-sensitive way, and their sensitivity to context was also revealed in place assimilation. The other two listener groups did not show sensitivity to context for either nasalization or place assimilation. Overall, the results of this study were supported by language-specific compensation mechanisms. Basic processing was controlled by language experience with assimilation rules. However, language-independent mechanism such as perceptual salience of segments was also at play. In addition, it seems that the status of a phonological rule in a native language and realization of segments in native speech also played an important role in compensation for assimilation. Lexical status of words did not seem to affect compensation patterns. (Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)