Individual Differences in Vowel Epenthesis among Korean Learners of English

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in vowel epenthesis among Korean L2 speakers of English, and its relationship to other measures of segmental and suprasegmental processing. Thirty-two subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks: spoken target words that were likely to have epenthetic vowels, read sentences, epenthetic vowel perception, identification of vowels and consonants, and stress deafness perception. The results demonstrate that Korean L2 speakers have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception. However, production and perception epenthesis are not correlated with each other, suggesting that they rely on different mechanisms. Overall, epenthesis was most strongly correlated with vowel production and perception, suggesting that epenthesis is more linked to segmental processes and representations.