Blurb:

This chapter shows that epenthetic and lexical vowels in Lebanese Arabic, which are often transcribed as identical, are acoustically distinct: epenthetic vowels are either shorter or backer or both. It is argued that this incomplete neutralization is the result of phonetics optionally accessing an intermediate level of phonological derivation. This is formalized in Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC): epenthesis requires a multi-step candidate chain, and phonetics can access any step of the chain. Furthermore, it is suggested that the acoustic distinction helps learners construct the correct candidate chains for words with epenthetic vs. lexical vowels.