Phonetic variability of nasals and voiced stops in Japanese

Abstract

We investigated the phonetic variability of nasals and voiced stops in a large-scale Japanese speech corpus. We then analyzed the types of variation across speech styles. In particular, we examined the instances where target segments are deleted or realized as different phonemes. We identified 285 lexical entries displaying variability of target segments in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (Maekawa, 2003). In line with the findings of Arai (1999), we observed a few variants of voiced stops, such as /d/ becoming [n] in /doɴna/ “what” and /g/ being deleted in /daigaku/ “university.” We also found /b/ turning into [m], such as /boku wa/ “I am” becoming [mo kaː]. For nasals, we observed /zeɴiɴ/ “all the people” and /geɴiɴ/ “reason” becoming [zẽːɪɴ] and [gẽːɪɴ], in which the first /ɴ/ was deleted and the preceding /e/ was nasalized and lengthened. Our findings suggest that the extent to which speakers produce phonetic variants of target segments is likely specified lexically more than stylistically because w...