When stimuli such as banket and lanket are presented dichotically, phonemic fusions often occur: subjects report hearing blanket. Previous studies have shown that stop +/r/ and stop +/l/ items have different fusion properties. For example, /l/ was sometimes substituted for /r/ (but rarely vice versa): gocery/rocery → (yielded) glocery. The present experiment varied the liquid stimuli along an acoustic continuum involving the third formant transition. For example, one set varied from ray to lay. Each was paired dichotically with an initial stop stimulus, in this case pay. All inputs (pay, ray, lay) and possible fusions (pray, play) were acceptible English words. When asked to report “what they heard,” subjects gave many fusion responses. Of these, there was a preponderance of stop +/l/ fusions (88% vs 12%). They occurred even for pairs where the liquid item was reported as an /r/ during separate binaural identification trials. Thus, given that an item was identified as ray, the same subjects reported hearing play when it was paired with pay: pay/ray → play. Despite the fact that the third formant transition is crucial for perception of /r/ vs /l/, this parameter was not responsible for the observed phoneme substitutions.