Is there 'dephrasing' of the accentual phrase in Japanese?

An experiment was carried out in order to examine two putative cases of 'dephrasing' of the accentual phrase in Japanese. The result revealed that it was possible to detect the accentedness of seemingly 'dephrased' accentual phrases in most of the cases. Although f0 contours of the accentual phrases in question are quasi-linear, we can detect their accentedness through the statistical examination of slope and intercept values of the regression lines fitted to the f0 contours.The author's stay in the U.S. was supported by the Ministry of Education, Japan

Five pieces of evidence suggesting large lookahead in spontaneous monologue

National Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsThere is considerable disagreement among the researchers of speech production with respect to the range of lookahead or pre-planning. In this paper, five pieces of evidence suggesting the presence of relatively large lookahead in spontaneous monologues are presented, based on the analyses of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. This evidence consistently suggests that the range of a lookahead is six to seven accentual phrases long, which corresponds on average to 3–4 seconds in the time domain

Production of the utterance-final moraic nasal in Japanese : A real-time MRI study

National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistic

Remarks on Japanese /w/

National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistic

A real-time MRI study of Japanese moraic nasal in utterance-final position

National Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsMoraic nasal of Japanese, often symbolized as /N/, is a nasal segment that has the status of an independent mora. It is widely acknowledged that the place of articulation of /N/ is determined by the assimilation to the following consonants; for example, /aNma/, /aNta/, and /aNka/ become [amma], [anta], and [aŋka] respectively. There is, however, a lack of consensus concerning the realization of /N/ in the utterance-final position. Places of articulation of utterance-final /N/ hitherto stipulated in the literatures include velar [ŋ], uvular [N], and nasalized vowels. A real-time MRI movie database was analyzed to solve this problem. Data of three male speakers revealed consistent results. The location of closure for the final /N/ is highly predictable by the membership of the immediately preceding vowel. Closure locations predicted by a generalized linear mixed-effect model regression analysis showed high correlation (between .887-.986) with the observed locations

An Investigation into Modern Mongolian Vowel Harmony Using Real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Takushoku UniversityInner Mongolia UniversityNational Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsThe principle which underlies modern Mongolian vowel harmony has been a matter of dispute. Many recent studies insist that the harmonic sets of vowels are phonetically distinguished in terms of the tongue root position (i.e., the size of the pharynx), while the distinction has been traditionally described by backness of the tongue. As no crucial articulatory evidence has been provided so far, we investigated this problem using real-time magnetic resonance imaging. In this paper we present robust physiological evidence that the two harmonic sets of vowels can be distinguished in terms of size of the pharynx and degree of tongue height in modern East Mongolian

Aeroacoustic differences between the Japanese fricatives [ɕ] and [ç]

Toyohashi University of TechnologyNational Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsToyohashi University of Technolog