This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /iː/ and /ɪ/ in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and /i/, while spectral cues are more important for native AmE speakers. However, little is known as to whether and how this non-native perceptual weighting can change as a result of L2 learning. By employing computational and experimental methods, the present study shows that Japanese learners of English exhibit different cue weighting depending on which language they think they hear. The experiment shows that listeners use more spectral cues and less durational cues when they think they are listening to ‘English’ stimuli as opposed to ‘Japanese’ stimuli, despite the stimuli being identical. This result is generally in line with our computer simulation, which predicts distinct developmental paths in first language (L1) and second language (L2) perception. The Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model, which incorporates the language mode hypothesis, provides a comprehensive explanation for the current findings.

Abstract. Formal semantic analyses often take words to be minimal building blocks for the purposes of compositionality. But various recent theories of morphology and syntax have converged on the view that there is no demarcation line corresponding to the word level. The same conclusion has emerged from the compositional semantics of superlatives. In the spirit of extending compositionality below the word level, this paper explores how a small set of particles (Japanese ka and mo, Chinese dou, and Hungarian vala/vagy, mind, and is) form quantifier words and serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, and existential verbs. Our main question is whether the meanings of these particles across the varied environments are highly regular, or they are lexicalized with a variety of different meanings that bear a family resemblance. This paper does not reach definitive conclusions, but it raises analytical possibilities using Boolean semantics and Inquisitive Semantics (the semantics of alternatives). It also draws attention to systematic similarities and some differences between the multiple uses of mo and dou that have not been studied in the literature, and reviews accounts in terms of maximality and additivity.

Japanese speakers systematically devoice or delete high vowels [i, u] between two voiceless consonants. Japanese listeners also report perceiving the same high vowels between consonant clusters even in the absence of a vocalic segment. Although perceptual vowel epenthesis has been described primarily as a phonotactic repair strategy, where a phonetically minimal vowel is epenthesized by default, few studies have investigated how the predictability of a vowel in a given context affects the choice of epenthetic vowel. The present study uses a forced-choice labeling task to test how sensitive Japanese listeners are to coarticulatory cues of high vowels [i, u] and non-high vowel [a] in devoicing and non-devoicing contexts. Devoicing contexts were further divided into high-predictability contexts, where the phonotactic distribution strongly favors one of the high vowels, and low-predictability contexts, where both high vowels are allowed, to specifically test for the effects of predictability. Results reveal a strong tendency towards [u] epenthesis as previous studies have found, but the results also reveal a sensitivity to coarticulatory cues that override the default [u] epenthesis, particularly in low-predictability contexts. Previous studies have shown that predictability affects phonetic implementation during production, and this study provides evidence predictability has similar effects during perception.

High vowel devoicing in Japanese, where /i, u/ in a CVC sequence devoice when both C and C are voiceless, has been studied extensively, but factors that contribute to the devoiced vowels' likelihood of complete deletion is still debated. This study examines the effects of phonotactic predictability on the deletion of devoiced vowels. Native Tokyo Japanese speakers (N = 22) were recorded in a sound-attenuated booth reading sentences containing lexical stimuli. C of the stimuli were /k, ʃ/, after which either high vowel can occur, and /ʧ, ϕ, s, ç/, after which only one of the two occurs. C was always a stop. C duration and center of gravity (COG), the amplitude weighted mean of frequencies present in a signal, were measured. Duration results show that devoicing lengthens only non-fricatives, while it has either no effect or a shortening effect on fricatives. COG results show that coarticulatory effects of devoiced vowels are evident in /k, ʃ/ but not in /ʧ, ϕ, s, ç/. Devoiced high vowels, therefore, seem to be more likely to delete when the vowel is phonotactically predictable than when it is unpredictable.