Durational compensation within a CV mora in spontaneous Japanese: Evidence from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese
Shigeto Kawahara
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003269
Previous experimental studies showed that in Japanese, vowels are longer after shorter onset consonants; there is durational compensation within a CV-mora. In order to address whether this compensation occurs in natural speech, this study re-examines this observation using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results, which are based on about 200,000 tokens, show that there is a negative correlation between the onset consonant and the following vowel, which is shown to be significant by a bootstrap resampling analysis. The compensation was not perfect, however, suggesting that it is a stochastic tendency rather than an absolute principle.