Temporal control in Japanese dialects

Abstract

This paper discusses the extent to which temporal control varies among Japanese dialects. Most dialects of Japanese including Tokyo Japanese are so‐called ‘‘mora dialects’’ in which the mora serves as the basic unit of timing. In the periphery of Japan, however, we find a couple of dialects called ‘‘syllable dialects’’ whose basic phonological unit is the syllable rather than the mora. Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) is one such dialect, but little is known about its temporal organization. The main purpose of this paper is to report on the results of an acoustic experiment on this syllable‐based dialect and to compare them with those of the experiments about Tokyo Japanese (TJ). This comparison reveals the following four points: (i) geminate consonants are considerably longer than single consonants in both TJ and KJ, (ii) however, the phonetic duration of words in KJ is not determined by the number of moras involved but by the number of syllables, (iii) in KJ, vowels are consistently shorter when they follow geminate consonants than when following single consonants, and (iv) unlike English, Korean, and other languages, neither TJ nor KJ shows an effect of vowel shortening in closed syllables.