The effect of lexical competition on realization of phonetic contrasts: a corpus study of the voicing contrast in Japanese

Studies on phonetic realization of phonological structure have revealed that certain lexical properties are reflected in fine details of speech production. Examples are vowel space expansion for words with dense neighbors, and VOT increase in voiceless stops for words with voicing minimal pairs. These lexical effects are primarily found in English, but there is much to explore in phonemically and prosodically different languages, such as Japanese. The present study investigated the duration of intervals around the burst of word initial velar stops in the Corpus of Spoken Japanese which has about 200 speakers’ annotations given by trained phoneticians. Minimal pair competitors and word familiarity data are drawn from an 80,000-word database. Results show significant effects of competitors on the duration of the following vowel and word familiarity on the closure duration, which suggests that lexical effects do exist in Japanese, but in a radically different manner from English.

Co-authored with Keiichi Tajima and Kiyoko Yoneyama, presented at International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, Aug. 5-9, 2019, supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16K02646, 18K00549, and 18K00662.