Speech Perception and Loanword Adaptations: The Case of Copy-Vowel Epenthesis

Japanese allows for almost no consonants in syllable codas. In loanwords, illegal codas are transformed into onsets by means of vowel epenthesis. The default epenthetic vowel in loanwords is [ɯ], and previous work has shown that this [ɯ]-epenthesis reflects Japanese listeners’ perception of illegal coda consonants. Here, we focus on one of the non-default cases: following coda [ç] and [x] the epenthetic vowel is a copy of the preceding vowel. Using an identification and a discrimination task, we provide evidence for the perceptual origin of this copy vowel phenomenon: After [ç] and [x], Japanese listeners perceive more often an epenthetic copy vowel than the default vowel [ɯ], whereas after [k] it is the reverse.