Epenthetic vowel production of unfamiliar medial consonant clusters by Japanese speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing nativized loanword studies have traditionally suggested that there are three epenthetic vowels in Japanese, which reflect both phonotactic restrictions and articulatory properties of certain consonant-vowel sequences in the language. Recent findings, however, call this tri-partite epenthesis pattern into question: First, several studies suggest that this epenthesis pattern is not true in the realm of perception and is not completely regular in production, and second, the relevant phonotactic restrictions seem to be weakening even outside of epenthesis contexts. This paper therefore investigates the extent to which the spontaneous choice of epenthetic vowels in the 'production' of Japanese conforms to the traditional tri-partite pattern. Epenthesis was induced by presenting pseudo-word stimuli of the form of [aCCa] (C = a voiced consonant) to subjects orthographically. The findings suggest that indeed, the production pattern does not fully conform to what is generally reported for nativized loanwords; in particular, the traditionally “default” vowel [ɯ] is used by our participants frequently in all contexts, including the two where [o] or [i] is usually reported. That said, we also show that there is considerable variability across speakers as to which vowel is epenthesized, especially in the palatal context, and this variability includes tokens of vowels similar to all possible lexical vowels of Japanese.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".