/p/-driven geminate devoicing in Japanese: Corpus and experimental evidence

Abstract

In Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates can be devoiced in the presence of another voiced obstruent (e.g., /doggu/ → /dokku/ ‘dog’). This devoicing pattern has been studied extensively in the recent phonological literature in terms of theoretical modeling as well as from the perspective of experimentation and corpus studies. Less well-known is the observation that /p/ may cause devoicing of geminates as well (e.g., /piramiddo/ → /piramitto/ ‘pyramid’), although to date no objective evidence has been offered to confirm this observation. The current study thus attempts to test this observation objectively by way of a corpus study and two phonological judgment experiments. The results generally support the idea that /p/ can cause devoicing of geminates in Japanese loanwords; in other words, /p/ may trigger Lyman’s Law in causing devoicing of geminates. In addition to this descriptive discovery, throughout the paper we discuss intriguing task effects in phonological experimentation, by comparing the corpus data and the results of the two judgment experiments. Although our aim is primarily descriptive, we offer some analytical possibilities for the /p/-driven devoicing of geminates at the end of the paper.

Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law

“…The results of Kawahara & Sano (2016) are reproduced in Figure 1, which shows that geminates are indeed judged to be pronounced as devoiced 40% or 30% of the time when they co-occur with /p/ or another voiced obstruent (the first two bars); the results also show, on the other hand, that the other conditions show very few devoiced responsesmost importantly, context-free devoicing of geminates rarely occurs (the third bar). Kawahara & Sano (2016) also examined corpus data, and found some instances of /p/-driven geminate devoicing as well as devoicing of geminates that co-occur with a voiced obstruent. On the other hand, context-free devoicing of geminates was barely found.…”

“…5 An anonymous reviewer asked whether /p/-driven geminate devoicing (the first bar in Figure 1) and geminate devoicing caused by a voiced obstruent (the second bar in Figure 1) are the same phenomenon. In Kawahara & Sano's (2016) corpus data, the latter showed higher devoicing probabilities, and the difference was statistically significant; on the other hand, in the judgment experiment, the former showed higher devoicing probabilities (Figure 1), although the difference did not reach significance. The current analysis, which relies on OCP(diacritic), treats the two devoicing patterns as one and the same phenomenon, which may at first sight seem to predict that they should occur with equal probability; however, it is not easy to tell from the observed probabilities alone whether they are caused by the same constraint-hence the same devoicing pattern-because the probability of devoicing is influenced by several other factors such as the number of triggers and the lexical frequencies of each item under question (Kawahara 2011;Coetzee & Kawahara 2013;.…”

“…In the naturalness judgment using a 5-point scale reported by Kawahara (2011), the devoicing of this word was rated much less natural than the devoicing of geminates in other Lyman's-Law-violating words: 3.16 vs. 3.86. This score for the devoicing of /ɡebberusu/ (3.16) is in fact lower than the average naturalness of devoicing of non-Lyman's-Law-violating words (3.26) in Kawahara (2011), whose devoicing was deemed almost impossible in Kawahara & Sano (2016) (see Kawahara & Sano (2016). Reprinted with the permission from the editor and the publisher.…”

“…Since this /p/-driven devoicing of geminates seems counterintuitive, Kawahara & Sano (2016) ran a judgment experiment to investigate whether this devoicing is real. In one of their experiments, they presented native speakers of Japanese with a list of existing words that contain particular sorts of structures: (i) geminates that appear with /p/ (e.g.…”

“…It is possible, however, that voicelessness should be represented as [+spread glottis] in Japanese (Tsuchida 1997;, in which case, Japanese phonology may lack the [voice] feature entirely in its system. Kawahara & Sano (2016) entertained possibilities other than the orthographic-based explanation for /p/-driven geminate devoicing, discussed in section 3.2. This subsection compares the current proposal with these alternatives to model /p/-driven geminate devoicing.…”