Vowel-coda interaction in Spontaneous Japanese utterances
Shigeto Kawahara
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003264
Japanese is often considered to be mora-timed, and the existence of syllables is sometimes questioned. Evidence for syllables comes from interactions between a vowel and the following consonant. Previous experiments show that vowels get longer before coda consonants. Using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, this study explores to what degree vowels lengthen before geminates and coda nasals. The results demonstrate that (i) vowels do lengthen before geminates and coda nasals, (ii) this lengthening occurs for all types of vowels, (iii) but degrees of lengthening differ by vowel, and (iv) vowels lengthen more before nasals than before geminates.