The Phonetics of Multiple Vowel Lengthening in Japanese

Shigeto Kawahara, Aaron Braver

Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA.
The Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan.

DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2013.32019                

Abstract

Many languages exploit a short vs. long lexical contrast in vowels. In most, if not all of these languages, the contrast is binary. In Japanese, however, speakers can lengthen vowels to express emphasis, and multiple degrees of lengthening can be used to express different degrees of emphasis. This paper offers the first experimental documentation of this emphatic vowel lengthening phenomenon. The current results demonstrate that, among the seven speakers recorded, at least a few speakers show six-levels of distinction in duration, and all but one speaker showed a steady linear correlation between duration and level of emphasis. We conclude that Japanese speakers have articulatory control that allows them to make very fine-grained durational distinctions, which go beyond mere binary short vs. long distinctions.

Keywords

Vowel Length; Duration; Emphasis; Japanese; (Non-)Binarity

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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