Voiced geminates in Yamagata and Tokyo Japanese

Abstract

Voiced geminate stops (/bb/, /dd/, /gg/, etc.) are cross‐linguistically rare, due to aerodynamic constraints on voicing during prolonged closure of the vocal tract. Standard Tokyo Japanese prohibits voiced geminate stops in native and Chinese‐borrowed vocabulary, but permits them in some recent loanwords (primarily English borrowings), where they reflect stress on the preceding syllable of the word in the originating language. (1)big–/biggu/ (2) headphone–/heddohoN/ Yachi‐ben (YB) is a local subdialect of the northeastern (Tohoku) dialect of Japanese, which is characterized in part by voicing of most non‐initial stops. Transcriptions of YB speech recorded in the 1970s by Japans National Language Research Institute (NLRI) indicate a sizeable number of voiced geminate stops, most frequently /dd/ but also /gg/ (there are no /bb/ tokens). In this study, voiced geminate stops from the NLRI recordings were compared with voiced geminate stops in English loanwords as pronounced by Tokyo Japanese (TJ) speakers. Closure duration, as well as duration and amplitude of closure voicing, were measured for both sets of data. Overall, voicing ratios (the percent of closure duration in which voicing was present) were found to be much longer in YB voiced geminates than in TJ voiced geminates.