Consonant cluster production in Japanese learners of English

Japanese speakers often face difficulty in producing complex syllable onsets in English and insert an extra vowel. We examined whether the vowel inserted by Japanese speakers was epenthetic (phonological) or excrescent (phonetic). The acoustic data suggested that an L1 phonological process was involved in vowel insertion by Japanese speakers with lower-level English competency, because the inserted vowels were similar to vowels in Japanese. More advanced speakers’ results, on the other hand, suggested that phonetics may be involved. The articulatory data from this pilot study with one speaker supported the findings of the acoustic data, suggesting that both phonetics and phonology affect Japanese speaker’s vowel insertion in a complex way. This paper is based on work previously reported in [1].