Individual Differences in Vowel Epenthesis among Korean Learners of English

Abstract

It has been established that Korean learners of English insert epenthetic vowels within consonant clusters, likely because consonant clusters are not used in Korean. The present studies investigated whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants), prosody, or are relatively independent of these processes. Thirty‐two subjects completed a battery of perception and production tasks: read target words that were likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction), read sentences, identification of vowels and consonants, stress deafness, epenthetic vowel perception, and the recognition of English sentences in noise. The preliminary results demonstrate that these measures are not strongly correlated with each other, suggesting that vowel epenthesis may be related to phonotactic processes that are only weakly related to the ability of second‐language learners to produce and perceive English segments or prosody.