Multiple Sources of Surprisal Affect Illusory Vowel Epenthesis

Area of Science:

• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Speech Perception

Background:

• Illusory epenthesis involves perceived vowel insertion in illegal consonant clusters without acoustic cues.
• Previous studies proposed phonetic minimality, phonotactic predictability, and phonological alternations as driving mechanisms.
• The role of these mechanisms and underlying phonological knowledge requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the roles of phonetic minimality, phonotactic predictability, and phonological alternations in illusory epenthesis.
• To test assumptions about phonological knowledge in Japanese epenthesis.
• To propose a unified goal for epenthetic vowel selection.

Main Methods:

• Corpus analysis of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese.
• Testing the explanatory power of three proposed mechanisms for illusory epenthesis.
• Examining phonological knowledge assumptions in previous research.

Main Results:

• Each of the three mechanisms (phonetic minimality, phonotactic predictability, phonological alternations) only partially explains observed epenthesis patterns.
• The proposed mechanisms share a common goal of minimally altering the speech signal.
• Assumptions about phonological knowledge in prior studies were challenged.

Conclusions:

• No single mechanism fully accounts for illusory epenthesis in Japanese.
• A combination or integration of mechanisms is likely necessary to explain epenthesis patterns.
• Future research should explore how these mechanisms interact to produce illusory epenthesis.