2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
An investigation of vowel devoicing and prosodic structure in Japanese
| Project/Area Number |
23720239
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Research Field |
Japanese linguistics
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| Research Institution | Ritsumeikan University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Research Collaborator |
GIRIKO Mikio 日本学術振興会, 特別研究員(PD) (00580028)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2011 – 2013
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| Keywords | 母音の無声化 / プロソディー / 韻律 / アクセント / 知覚 / 形態論 / フット / 日本語 |
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| Research Abstract |
In this project, I investigated vowel devoicing, a well-studied phonological feature of Japanese, focusing on its interaction with prosodic structure, a relatively unexplored area in the literature. The following two findings comprise the main contribution of my project.
First, I conducted a perception experiment to test whether Japanese speakers can hear accent contrasts between words involving accents on devoiced vowels. I found that although participants could hear the contrasts fairly well overall, one contrast type was harder to detect than others, suggesting a bias in perception toward certain accent patterns.
Second, I carried out a dictionary survey and production experiment to discover whether vowel devoicing would be affected by morphological information such as word-internal boundaries, as claimed in the literature. The results suggest that it is not the morphology but rather phonology, specifically prosodic information, that affects vowel devoicing in Japanese.
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