Building on Vance

Abstract Lyman's Law is a general phonotactic restriction in Japanese which prohibits two voiced obstruents within the same morpheme. This law manifests itself, for example, in the blockage of Rendaku, a phenomenon which voices the initial consonant of the second member of a compound. Lyman's Law blocks Rendaku when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent. Lyman's Law has been formulated as a general phonotactic restriction against two voiced obstruents (Itô and Mester, 1986), and believed to hold only in native words, not in loanwords, because there are many loanwords that violate this restriction (e.g. [gaado] 'guard' and [bagu] 'bug': Mester, 2003, 2008). Building o

A Quantitative Study of Voiced Velar Nasalization in Japanese

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of voiced velar nasalization (VVN) in the standard (Yamanote) dialect of Japanese, in which a voiced velar plosive /g/ becomes nasalized in prosodic-word-medial position. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study of the phenomenon, and confirms the impressionistic observation reported in the previous literature; at the same time, our study finds that these generalizations are stochastic. Looking more closely at the determinants of this variation reveals intriguing ways in which phonological grammar and lexicon interact, as well as the role of frequency in shaping phonological variation. Outside of frequency, we also examine factors such as prosodic length, and the effects of the segmental context on VVN

The Sound Symbolic Patterns in Pokémon Move Names in Japanese

　In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatically growing interest in sound symbolism, systematic associations between sounds and meanings. A recent case study of sound symbolism shows that in Pok´emon games, longer names are generally associated with stronger Pok´emon characters, and moreover those Pok´emon characters with names having more voiced obstruents are generally stronger (Kawahara et al., 2018b). The current study examined the productivity of these sound symbolic effects in the names of the moves that Pok´emon creatures use when they battle. The analysis of the existing move names shows that the effect of name length on attack values is robust, and that the effect of voiced obstruents is tangible. These sound symbolic patterns hold, despite the fact that most (= 99%) move names are based on real words in Japanese. An additional experiment with nonce names shows that both of these effects are very robust.Overall, the current paper adds to the growing body of studies showing that the relationships between sounds and meanings are not as arbitrary as modern linguistic theories have standardly assumed. Uniquely, the current analysis of the existing move names shows that such non-arbitrary relationships can hold even when the set of words under consideration are mostly existing words (Shih & Rudin, 2019; Sidhu et al., 2019)

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages, Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean, shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are 'embodied' in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

Incomplete Neutralization in Japanese Monomoraic Lengthening

Incomplete neutralization (IN) (Port et al. 1981, Fourakis & Iverson 1984, Port & O'Dell 1985) refers to cases in which two underlyingly distinct segments become nearly identical on the surface. IN has posed a challenge for traditional views of the phonetics-phonology interface. While classical modular feedforward architectures (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968, Bermúdez-Otero 2007) generally do not allow underlying phonological representations to directly affect phonetic realization, incompletely neutralized contrasts show subphonemic distinctions on the surface that can only be inferred from the underlying representations. We show that the combination of two independently motivated theoretical mechanisms – paradigm uniformity (Benua 1997, Steriade 2000) and weighted phonetic constraints (Legendre et al. 1990, Zsiga 2000, Flemming 2001, Pater 2009) – automatically account for the IN patterns

Consequences of High Vowel Deletion for Syllabification in Japanese

High vowels in Japanese devoice between two voiceless consonants; recent work has shown that devoiced /u/ in this environment is also variably deleted. This paper investigates the syllabification of consonant clusters resulting from vowel deletion. We consider two competing hypotheses from the literature: (H1) that consonant clusters are parsed tautosyllabically into a complex syllable onset and (H2) that consonant clusters are parsed heterosyllabically, with the consonant preceding the deleted vowel becoming a syllabic consonant. We bring both phonological and phonetic evidence bear on evaluating these hypotheses. The phonological evidence draws on patterns sensitive to syllable structure including pitch accent placement, loanword truncation, hypocoristic formation, and mimetics. The phonetic evidence comes from patterns of temporal stability in articulatory data collected with ElectroMagnetic Articulography. Both types of evidence provide converging support for H2

Identity Avoidance and Rendaku

One important observation that is made in the past phonological research is that constraints on output structures can both block and trigger phonological processes (i.e., conspiracy: Kisseberth 1970). This paper reports an experiment which shows that an Identity Avoidance constraint (a.k.a. the OCP) both blocks and triggers one phonological process in the same language, namely rendaku in Japanese. Our wug- experiment shows that rendaku is more likely to apply when the two CV moras across a morpheme boundary are identical; i.e. an Identity Avoidance constraint triggers rendaku. The experiment also shows that rendaku is less likely to apply when it would result in two adjacent identical CV moras across a morpheme boundary; i.e. the Identity Avoidance constraint blocks rendaku. These blocking and triggering effects of the general Identity Avoidance constraint on rendaku are a new discovery in Japanese phonology, despite the fact that rendaku has been studied extensively in the previous literature, suggesting the importance of experimentation in phonological research. Moreover, our case study offers experimental confirmation of the OCP conspiracy in natural languages

Speaking rate normalization across different talkers in the perception of Japanese stop and vowel length contrasts

7 pagesPerception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners’ perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers’ speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process that happens in the early phase of perception