Japanese coda [m] elicits both perceptual assimilation and epenthesis

Abstract

When listeners are exposed to non-native speech, they sometimes perceptually repair the incoming signal to better adhere to the phonotactics of their native language. The present study examines two repair strategies-perceptual assimilation and epenthesis-in two experiments designed to test how Japanese listeners perceive non-homorganic coda [m]. In the first experiment, Japanese listeners categorized tokens that contain a medial coda [m] or a word-final coda [m] into categories represented by the Japanese Hiragana orthography with /mu/ or /ɴ/ in the target position. In Experiment 2, participants discriminated between tokens with coda [m] and tokens with [mu] or [n] in the target position in a series of AXB discrimination tests. The results show that Japanese listeners employ both perceptual epenthesis and perceptual assimilation when exposed to coda [m] sequences but favor assimilation over epenthesis, particularly in the word-final position.