Abstract
Japanese speakers systematically devoice or delete high vowels [i, u] between two voiceless consonants. Japanese listeners also report perceiving the same high vowels between consonant clusters even in the absence of a vocalic segment. Although perceptual vowel epenthesis has been described primarily as a phonotactic repair strategy, where a phonetically minimal vowel is epenthesized by default, few studies have investigated how the predictability of a vowel in a given context affects the choice of epenthetic vowel. The present study uses a forced-choice labeling task to test how sensitive Japanese listeners are to coarticulatory cues of high vowels [i, u] and non-high vowel [a] in devoicing and non-devoicing contexts. Devoicing contexts were further divided into high-predictability contexts, where the phonotactic distribution strongly favors one of the high vowels, and low-predictability contexts, where both high vowels are allowed, to specifically test for the effects of predictability. Results reveal a strong tendency towards [u] epenthesis as previous studies have found, but the results also reveal a sensitivity to coarticulatory cues that override the default [u] epenthesis, particularly in low-predictability contexts. Previous studies have shown that predictability affects phonetic implementation during production, and this study provides evidence predictability has similar effects during perception.
Highlights
The current study investigates Japanese listeners and the role of phonotactic predictability in how illicit consonant clusters are repaired
The results reported collapsed the trials, the event-related potential (ERP) results generally showed that Japanese speakers are insensitive to the differences between the vowel-ful and vowel-less items, while French speakers are, supporting the behavioral results from the original study by Dupoux et al (1999)
The stimuli were divided into three groups: non-devoicing (NoDevoice) where vowel devoicing is not expected, low predictability (LoPredict) where both high vowels can occur and devoice, making coarticulatory cues necessary for recovery of a devoiced vowel, and high predictability (HiPredict) where phonotactic predictability is sufficient for recovery of a devoiced vowel, making coarticulatory cues less important
Summary
The current study investigates Japanese listeners and the role of phonotactic predictability in how illicit consonant clusters are repaired. Exemplar-based approaches to phonology (Bybee, 2006; Ernestus, 2011; Pierrehumbert, 2001) have long noted that it is often the most frequent lexical items that are targeted for reduction due to their predictability. Building on this line of research, Hall, Hume, Jaeger, and Wedel (2016) argue that phonological systems tend to reduce segments in predictable
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