Reconciling CV phonotactics and high vowel deletion in Japanese

Effect of vowel on pitch discrimination of CV in Japanese

The pitch dynamics seem to be based on the pitch thresholds (DLs) between the Vowels, V and CV, and also CV and CV. In this study, the DLs were measured for discrimination of pitch (fundamental frequency) of complex tone, Japanese Vowel (V) and Consonance-Vowel (CV) speech. A nominal F0 of complex tone was 170 Hz and the pitch of V and CV speech were resynthesized same as 170Hz. Tone was band-p...

Phonotactics in the perception of Japanese vowel length: evidence for long-distance dependencies

These experiments investigate whether the perceptual boundary between [a] and [a:] is affected by the differing phonotactics of the Sino-Japanese and Foreign strata of the Japanese lexicon. We presented a range of edited natural vowels from [a] to [a:] at the end of carrier nonwords of the form [CoC'__] and asked subjects to judge whether the final vowel was long or short, while C and C' were v...

Shoji and Shoji Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English Vowel Epenthesis and Consonant Deletion in Japanese Loanwords from English

Vowel Devoicing in Tokyo Japanese

This paper proposes a phonological analysis for vowel devoicing in Tokyo Japanese using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). Generally speaking, in Japanese the high vowels /i, u/ are devoiced when they occur between two voiceless consonants. However, there are some contexts where such a simple generalization does not hold, e.g., so called “word-final devoicing” and ...

Adult and infant sensitivity to phonotactic features in spoken Japanese

Japanese speakers perceive an epenthetic vowel between consonants in words, reflecting an adaptation to Japanese phonotactics. However, there are some contexts in which CC (successive consonant) clusters are acceptable in Japanese speech. This study explored how Japanese speakers perceive phoneme sequences according to Japanese phonotactics. In Experiment 1, adults rated goodness of nonsense wo...