Evaluation of vowel hiatus in prosodic boundaries of Japanese

We investigated V-V hiatus through J-ToBI labeling and listening to whole phrases to estimate degree of discontinuity and, if possible, to determine the exact boundary between two phrases. Appropriate boundaries were found in most cases as the maximum perceptual score. Using electroglottography (EGG) of the open quotients OQ, pitch mark and spectrogram, the acoustic phonological feature of these V-V hiatus was found as phrase-initial glottalization and phrase-final nasalization observable in EGG and spectrogram, as well as phrase-final lengthening and phrase-initial shortening of the morae. A small dip was observable at the boundary of V-V hiatus showing glottalization. The test materials are taken from the "Japanese MULTEXT", consisting of a particle vowel (36), adjective vowel (5), and word word (4).