The purpose of this study is to investigate whether compensation for phonological assimilation depends on language-specific knowledge. Native Korean, English, and Chinese speakers participated in an identification task involving obstruent nasalization and coronal place assimilation. The results showed that Korean speakers compensated for nasalization and place assimilation in a context-sensitive way. But the degree of compensation was greater in nasalization than in place assimilation. English speakers also revealed some sensitivity to contexts in both nasalization and place assimilation. On the contrary, Chinese speakers did not show any sensitivity to context at all. Overall, the results of this study were supported by languagespecific compensation mechanisms. However, perceptual salience or acoustic properties of related segments were also at play. Furthermore, the effect of lexical status of words was shown although its effect was weaker than that of other factors.