Multiple Sources of Surprisal Affect Illusory Vowel Epenthesis

Abstract

Illusory epenthesis is a phenomenon in which listeners report hearing a vowel between a phonotactically illegal consonant cluster, even in the complete absence of vocalic cues. The present study uses Japanese as a test case and investigates the respective roles of three mechanisms that have been claimed to drive the choice of epenthetic vowel—phonetic minimality, phonotactic predictability, and phonological alternations—and propose that they share the same rational goal of searching for the vowel that minimally alters the original speech signal. Additionally, crucial assumptions regarding phonological knowledge held by previous studies are tested in a series of corpus analyses using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. Results show that all three mechanisms can only partially account for epenthesis patterns observed in language users, and the study concludes by discussing possible ways in which the mechanisms might be integrated.

Formalising phonological perception: The role of voicing assimilation in consonant cluster perception in Emilian dialects

“…The influence of language-specific phonotactic restrictions on speech perception (Polivanov 1931; Swadesh 1934; among others) has been recently backed up by studies on so-called illusory vowels, where listeners perceive a vocalic segment even though there are no corresponding formants in the acoustic signal (Dehaene-Lambertz et al 2000; Berent et al 2007; Kabak & Idsardi 2007; Boersma & Hamann 2009; Monahan et al 2009; Dupoux et al 2011; Kilpatrick et al 2021; Whang 2021). A well-known example comes from the study by Dupoux et al (1999), where native Japanese listeners presented with French realisations of nonce words, such as /ebzo/, with an obstruent cluster that is phonotactically illicit in Japanese speech, reported to have heard a vowel breaking up the illicit cluster (e.g.…”