Gemination of Consonant in Spontaneous Speech: An Analysis of the "Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese"

Abstract

In Japanese, there is frequent alternation between CV morae and moraic geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzed the phonemic environments of consonant gemination (CG) using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). The results revealed that the environment in which gemination occurs is, to some extent, parallel to that of vowel devoicing. However, there are two crucial differences. One difference is that the CG tends to occur in a /kVk/ environment, whereas such is not the case for vowel devoicing. The second difference is that when the preceding consonant is /r/, gemination occurs, but not vowel devoicing. These observations suggest that the mechanism leading to CG differs from that which leads to vowel devoicing.