When listeners are exposed to non-native speech, they sometimes perceptually repair the incoming signal to better adhere to the phonotactics of their native language. The present study examines two repair strategies—perceptual assimilation and epenthesis—in two experiments designed to test how Japanese listeners perceive non-homorganic coda [m]. In the first experiment, Japanese listeners categorized tokens that contain a medial coda [m] or a word-final coda [m] into categories represented by the Japanese Hiragana orthography with /mu/ or /ɴ/ in the target position. In Experiment 2, participants discriminated between tokens with coda [m] and tokens with [mu] or [n] in the target position in a series of AXB discrimination tests. The results show that Japanese listeners employ both perceptual epenthesis and perceptual assimilation when exposed to coda [m] sequences but favor assimilation over epenthesis, particularly in the word-final position.
Cite as: Kilpatrick, A.J., Kawahara, S., Bundgaard-Nielsen, R.L., Baker, B.J., Fletcher, J. (2018) Japanese coda [m] elicits both perceptual assimilation and epenthesis. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 79-83, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-14
@inproceedings{kilpatrick18_isaph,
author={Alexander J. Kilpatrick and Shigeto Kawahara and Rikke L. Bundgaard-Nielsen and Brett J. Baker and Janet Fletcher},
title={{Japanese coda [m] elicits both perceptual assimilation and epenthesis}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={79--83},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-14}
}