助詞における母音弱化―「が」、「と」、「で」の母音a, o, e 弱化研究

Abstract

Vowel reduction is the phenomena, in which the duration and the formant transition of vowels in function words shorten in conversations. The phenomena have been observed in stress-accent languages. In this paper, I will report the results of the research whether or not vowel reduction occurred in a pitch accent language, Japanese. As I mentioned before, vowel reduction has two phenomena: shortening of duration and shortening of formant transition. Firstly, the durations of function vowels (”ga” and ”to”) were shorter than content vowels. Secondly, ”a” in the particle ”ga” was more centralized than the corresponding ”a.” Thus, vowel reduction occurs in the Japanese language although the Japanese language was the pitch accent language. Therefore, the vowel reduction is the part of universal grammar.