Not All Epenthetic Contexts are Equal: Differential Effects in Japanese Illusory Vowel Perception * PHILIP J. MONAHAN, ERI TAKAHASHI, CHIZURU NAKAO AND WILLIAM IDSARDI University of Maryland 1. Introduction Recent psycholinguistic research has emphasized the role of native lan- guage phonological knowledge in the online perception of non-native struc- ture (Näätänen et al. 1997; Dupoux et al. 1999; Dehaene-Lambertz, Dupoux and Gout 2000; Dupoux et al. 2001; Kazanina, Phillips and Idsardi 2006; Kabak and Idsardi 2007). These findings indicate that the native language phonology strongly constrains the types of linguistic representations that can be constructed and entertained during speech perception. For example, Dupoux et al. (1999) demonstrated that Japanese listeners illusorily per- ceive an epenthetic [u] – more properly [ɯ] – when presented with conso- nant clusters that violate the phonotactics of Japanese. Thus, it appears that Japanese listeners bring their native language phonology to bear on their * This project was supported by NIH DC R01 05660 to David Poeppel.