Production of Syllable Structure in a Second Language: Factors Affecting Vowel Epenthesis in Japanese-Accented English

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Published: Nov 2, 2018
Keywords:
English, Japanese, epenthetic vowels, second language acquisition

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Keiichi Tajima
Donna Erickson
Kyoko Nagao

Abstract

A salient characteristic of English spoken by native Japanese speakers is their tendency to insert epenthetic vowels between consonants or following word-final consonants (e.g., English stress as /su.to.re.su/). This study conducted speech analysis of a set of Japanese-accented English utterances to obtain quantitative estimates of how often vowel epenthesis actually occurs, and evaluated the effects of various factors that may influence vowel epenthesis. Results revealed significant effects of speaking rate and phonetic environment on the rate of occurrence of epenthetic vowels, but little effect of word familiarity and presence of Japanese loanwords for the English words.

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Vol. 2 No. 2 (2002): Speech Prosody and Timing: Dynamic Aspects of Speech
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Articles

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