In studies of production and second language acquisition, it is typically assumed that when speakers produce a vowel between the consonants in a sequence that is phonotactically illegal in the native langauge, it is a result of the phonological epenthesis of a vowel (e.g. Tarone 1987, Broselow and Finer 1991, Hancin-Bhatt and Bhatt 1998, Davidson, Jusczyk and Smolensky 2003). For example, Taron...

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second languge (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehler's (1999) results ...

Recent accounts of consonant epenthesis either predict the locus of and give structural motivation for epenthesis (Prince & Smolensky 1993, Alber 2001 among others), such as the requirement for syllables to start in a consonantal onset or the breaking up of a vowel sequence or they explain the choice of segment, i.e., why languages prefer the glottal stop, the coronal stop or some other consona...

We investigated the mechanisms of vowel epenthesis in consonant clusters using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Tongue tip movements were measured during the articulation of native and non-native consonant clusters in English. The subjects were three English speakers (2 males and 1 female). The speech samples were 3 words: blat, bnat, btat. In these words, consonant cluster /bl/ is native in Englis...

During spoken language comprehension, auditory input activates a bilingual's two languages in parallel based on phonological representations that are shared across languages. However, it is unclear whether bilinguals access phonotactic constraints from the non-target language during target language processing. For example, in Spanish, words with s+ consonant onsets cannot exist, and phonotactic...