This paper offers a simple interpretation of an empirical generalization on the rates of application of variable phonological processes developed by Bruce Hayes and Kie Zuraw (HZ; Zuraw & Hayes 2017, Hayes 2021a,b, 2022). The interpretation is couched within the harmony-based framework where an underlying form is realized as a candidate surface form with a probability proportional to the harmony score of the constraint violation profile of the resulting mapping. The main result is that, within this harmony-based framework, HZ’s generalization is equivalent to the simple intuition that the constraints that are even for an underlying form (because they assign the same number of violations to all its candidates) should not matter when choosing the surface realization of that underlying form.
