The Perception of Epenthetic Vowels in Voiced and Voiceless Contexts in Japanese

Abstract

Dupoux et al. (1999) showed that Japanese native speakers perceptually inserted a vowel /u/ between consonant clusters when listening to nonce words containing consonant clusters. Our study aimed to examine the effect of voicing type of these clusters on perceptual vowel epenthesis and replicate the results of Dupoux et al. (1999) between English and Japanese. We constructed nonce words containing both voiced and voiceless consonant clusters and the stimuli were recorded by a female English native speaker. 10 English native speakers and 10 Japanese native speakers were recruited and asked to judge whether they heard a /u/ in the stimuli. The results showed that voicing does not have an effect on perceptual vowel epenthesis in Japanese and both Japanese and English participants in our study behaved similarly to their Japanese and French counterparts in Dupoux et al. (1999).