The role of phrasal phonology in speech perception: What perceptual epenthesis shows us

Recent research using the phenomenon of illusory vowels has raised our awareness of the extent to which speech perception is modulated by the listener's native-language phonological knowledge. However, most of the focus has been limited to word-level phonological knowledge. In this article, we suggest that the perceptual system recruits segmental phonological knowledge that makes crucial reference to prosodic domains far beyond the word-level. We report the results from three identification experiments on Korean and American English participants. In accordance with their native-language phonotactic constraints at the level of the Intonational Phrase, Korean listeners unlike American English listeners hear more illusory vowels in stimuli containing the sequence of voiced stops followed by nasal consonants (e.g. [eɡma]) than those containing voiceless stops followed by nasal consonants (e.g. [ekma]). The results are interpreted as support for the view that speech perception makes crucial reference to the concept of reverse inference.