Partial devoicing of voiced geminate stops in Tokyo Japanese

Abstract

Tokyo Japanese has a constraint against voiced geminate stops in its native lexicon. The present study investigates whether recently introduced word-medial voiced geminate stops [C1V1C(C)2V2] are differentiated from voiceless geminates and voiced singletons in terms of duration, voicing during closure, and spectral moments of stop release bursts. The findings suggest that the voiceless and voiced singleton stops were clearly differentiated by C2 duration. In contrast, C2 duration of the voiceless and voiced geminate stops was not significantly different. The devoicing of the word-medial stops was not only observed in voiced geminates, but voiced singletons also showed devoicing. The duration of the preceding vowel (V1) distinguished the voicing contrast in both singleton and geminate stops. The first four spectral moments of C2 stop release bursts did not distinguish the length and voicing contrasts in stops. These results indicate that, although wordmedial voiced geminate stops are fully or partially devoiced, the Tokyo Japanese speakers lengthen the preceding vowels (V1) to maintain a voicing contrast. Production patterns of the voiced geminates are considered in relation to marginal or intermediate phonological contrast.

Articulation of geminate obstruents in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan: A real-time MRI analysis

“…The result of the rt-MRI supports our previous acoustical analysis with five speakers of the Ikema dialect (including the two analyzed in this paper), showing that word-medial geminate consonants and word-initial geminate fricatives are significantly longer than their singleton counterparts (Shinohara & Fujimoto 2018). The clear length difference conforms to word-medial geminates in standard Japanese (Han 1962(Han , 1994Homma 1981;Beckman 1982;Idemaru &Guion 2008 andHussain &Shinohara 2019 among others) and other languages that have a singleton-geminate contrast (e.g. Ham 2001, Ridouane 2007, Hussain 2015.…”

“…In standard Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates are observed only in recent borrowings such as /beddo/ 'bed' or /baggu/ 'bag' and in onomatopoeia. Acoustic analyses clearly indicated that those voiced geminates are partially or fully devoiced (Kawahara 2006, Matsuura 2012, Fujimoto & Funatsu 2018, Hussain & Shinohara 2019. However, acoustic analyses of voiced geminates in the dialects of the Kumamoto and Amakusa areas of Kyushu, Japan, showed that the amount of voicing during the closure phase varied, depending on words, speakers, sub-dialects, and tokens, indicating the instability of voiced geminates in those dialects (Matsuura 2016, Takada 2018.…”

Cross-language perception of Japanese consonant length by speakers from Italian- and Mandarin-speaking backgrounds

“…In Japanese, voiced geminates are disfavoured and their occurrence is limited mostly to loanwords (e.g. Hussein and Shinohara, 2019; Kawahara, 2015).…”

Perception of consonant length in familiar and unfamiliar languages by native speakers of Mandarin, Italian and Japanese

“…Italian uses length contrasts for a wide variety of phonemes differing in voicing, place and manner of articulation [5,[12][13][14][15]. In Japanese, on the other hand, voiced geminates are disfavoured and their occurrence is limited mostly to loanwords [16,17]. To record the stimuli to be used in the perception study, each word was presented on a computer screen in random order and was produced in two separate conditions: one in isolation and the other in a carrier sentence (/diko X di nwɔvo/ 'I say X again' for Italian and /sokowa X to jomimasu/ 'You read it as X there' for Japanese).…”