Factors inducing cross‐linguistic perception of illusory vowels.

Abstract

Japanese speakers tended to hear an illusory vowel in illegal consonant sequences (Dupoux et al., 1999). Korean has no sequences of stop followed by nasal; therefore, it is expected that Korean speakers would perceive an illusory vowel in stop‐nasal. In an identification task comparing Korean and English listeners on stimuli along a continuum that ranged from no vowel (igna/ikna) to a full vowel (igVna/ikVna), Korean listeners reported the presence of a vowel significantly more often than English listeners, even when there is no vowel in the stimuli. However, this effect was found only when the stop was voiced, even though [kn] and [gn] are both illegal Korean sequences. In an AXB discrimination task, Korean participants had more difficulty discriminating ‘stop‐nasal’ from ‘stop‐V‐nasal’ than English participants, again only when the stop was voiced. The results suggest that voicing, rather than simple illegality, induces bias toward perception of illusory vowel in Korean. This is explained by the fact th...