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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 16:2 (2026) ► pp.203–232

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Individual variation in epenthetic vowel production by Brazilian Portuguese–Japanese bilinguals

ORCiD logo with link | Leiden University
ORCiD logo with link | National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics | Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Leiden University.

Published online: 14 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.25006.lam
Abstract
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Japanese have phonological repair strategies that involve vowel epenthesis in illicit consonant clusters, but whereas BP inserts /i/, Japanese inserts /ɯ/ as a default. For example, a loanword like ‘TikTok’ is typically produced as /ti.ki.tɔ.ki/ in BP and as /tik.kɯ.tok.kɯ/in Japanese. Here, we ask whether balanced BP–Japanese bilinguals apply their language-specific repair strategies separately, or whether one language’s strategy ‘spills over’ into the other, and if such spillover occurs, which individual factors predict its likelihood.
Twenty-two BP–Japanese bilinguals participated in a production task in which they were presented with stimuli containing illicit consonant clusters, e.g., /agbo/, and produced these forms within a BP or Japanese carrier sentence. A model predicting the likelihood of epenthesis type revealed that speakers mostly applied language-specific strategies separately, i.e., /i/-epenthesis in the BP sentences and /ɯ/-epenthesis in the Japanese sentences. However, in some cases, we observed ‘spillover’, e.g., /i/-epenthesis in Japanese or /ɯ/-epenthesis in BP. Individual variation in language dominance, aggregate immersion, and phonolexical perception acuity predicted the likelihood of such spillover. These findings contribute new production data to a growing body of literature on individual variation in bilinguals’ language-specific phonotactics.
Article outline
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Phonological repair strategies
    • 1.2Vowel epenthesis in bilinguals
  • 2.The present study
    • 2.1BP–Japanese bilinguals in Japan
    • 2.2Vowel epenthesis in BP and Japanese
    • 2.3Factors that may predict phonotactic spillover
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Speakers
    • 3.2Experiment overview
    • 3.3Control tasks
      • 3.3.1Gating task (phonolexical perception)
      • 3.3.2MINT Sprint (lexical access)
    • 3.4Production task
      • 3.4.1Stimuli
      • 3.4.2Procedure
      • 3.4.3Annotation procedure
    • 3.5Statistical procedures
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Model results
      • 4.2.1Comparisons between and within language
      • 4.2.2Interaction language: Dominance ratio
      • 4.2.3Effect of immersion
      • 4.2.4Interaction Language: Phonolexical perception
      • 4.2.5Effect of lexical access
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Occurrence and distribution of vowel epenthesis
    • 5.2Factors that predicted phonotactic spillover
    • 5.3Final considerations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Data availability statement
  • CRediT statement
  • Notes
  • References
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