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Cross-linguistically, certain vowel types tend to be used to break up otherwise illformed consonant clusters in a given language: they are generally non-low, nonround and either front or central. Such epenthetic vowels are commonly referred to the languagePs default vowel. For example, the default vowel in Maltese is [i], in Spanish it is [e], in Korean it is [], in German, Dutch and Finnish it is [], and [] or [] in English. One might assume, then, that these vowels have certain properties that make them particularly good candidates for being the epenthetic vowel. One commonly used means of predicting the quality of the epenthetic vowel has been to draw on markedness. In this approach, default vowels are considered unmarked either universally or on a language-specific basis (eg Archangeli 1984; Pulleyblank 1988; Rice 1999, 2000). Indeed, Rice (2000) points to epenthesis as a diagnostic for identifying the unmarked member of an opposition, proposing that the unmarked member is more likely to be inserted (though cf. Rice 2007). While such approaches are successful in predicting the most common patterns involving front or central unrounded vowels, they are less successful when the vowel involved is not obviously unmarked, as in the case of French. The default vowel in French, while commonly referred to as schwa, is a front or centralized rounded vowel, realized phonetically as similar or identical to the mid-front rounded vowels [ø] or [c], depending on speaker and variety. The