Consonant-Final Loanwords and Epenthetic Vowels in Italian

Consonant-Final Loanwords and Epenthetic Vowels in Italian*

The quality of an epenthetic vowel in a particular language may vary depending on segmental and prosodic factors, such as the quality of the surrounding consonants, the quality of other vowels in the word, and the position of the epenthetic vowel within the word. This last factor has received little attention in the literature. I have identified a number of cases in Italian in which the quality...

Epenthetic Vowels in Japanese: a Perceptual Illusion?

In four cross-linguistic experiments comparing French and Japanese hearers, we found that the phonotactic properties of Japanese (very reduced set of syllable types) induce Japanese listeners to perceive “illusory” vowels inside consonant clusters in VCCV stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a continuum of stimuli ranging from no vowel (e.g. ebzo) to a full vowel between the consonants (e.g...

Markedness and the Typology of Epenthetic Vowels

Using cross-linguistic evidence from the relationship of epenthetic vowel choice to the vowel system of a given language, this paper proposes a set of context-free markedness constraints on vowel features. Universally ranked constraints yield the result that front vowels are more marked than back and that round vowels are marked; languages may vary in how they rank the markedness of low and non...

Shoji and Shoji Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English

Evidence for phonetic adaptation of loanwords: an experimental study

Japanese loanword adaptations show an asymmetry in the treatment of word-final [n] in words from French and English, respectively: while word-final [n] is adapted as a moraic nasal consonant in loanwords from English, it is adapted as a geminate nasal followed by an epenthetic vowel in loanwords from French. We provide evidence that this asymmetry originates in the way Japanese speakers perceiv...