Vowel epenthesis and stress-focus interaction in L2 speech perception

The goal of the current study is to investigate whether L2 learners' perceptual ability regarding epenthetic vowels is interconnected with other aspects of speech recognition, such as lexical stress, sentence focus, and vowel recognition. Twenty-five Korean L2 learners of English participated in perception experiments assessing vowel epenthesis oddity, lexical stress oddity, sentence focus oddity, and vowel identification. Results indicate that accuracy on the vowel epenthesis oddity test is influenced by both lexical stress and sentence focus, suggesting that perceptual ability regarding epenthetic vowels is influenced by the acquisition of L2 rhythmic structure at both word and sentence levels. Additionally, this study identifies a proficiency effect on vowel epenthesis recognition, implying that the influence of L1 phonotactics diminishes as L2 proficiency increases. Taken together, this study illustrates the interaction between perceptual abilities in vowel epenthesis and prosodic stress in the field of L2 speech perception.