Perception and production of consonant clusters in Japanese-English bilingual and Japanese monolingual speakers

Abstract

Previous research has revealed that Japanese native speakers are more likely to perceive an ‘illusory vowel’ within consonant clusters compared to French native speakers (Dupoux et al. 1998). The aim of this research is to investigate the differences of perception and production of consonant clusters in Japanese-English bilinguals and Japanese monolinguals. The stimuli of the two experiments consist of 36 pseudo-words that contain the two sequences, VCCV and VCVCV. Results of the perception and the production experiments on the two groups of participants revealed that bilinguals were more likely to achieve high scores in both experiments. Index Terms: consonant clusters, bilingual, speech perception, speech production