Durational Evidence That Tokyo Japanese Vowel Devoicing Is Not Gradient Reduction

• Main Authors: James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Francisco Torreira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-04-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: phonetics; syllable duration; Japanese; spontaneous speech; vowel devoicing
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00821/full

A central question in the Japanese high vowel devoicing literature concerns whether vowels are devoiced through a categorical process or via gradient reduction. Examining how vowel height and consonantal voicing condition phrase-internal CV duration in a corpus of spontaneous Tokyo Japanese, it was found that CVs containing high vowels are substantially shorter before voiceless consonants, whilst non-high vowels do not exhibit comparable shortening. This quantitative difference between CV durations suggests a controlled temporal compression of the CV, consistent with views that Japanese vowel devoicing is produced through a categorical process targeting high vowels preceding voiceless consonants, and supports previous observations made of elicited productions.