TITLE:
The Phonetics of Multiple Vowel Lengthening in Japanese
AUTHORS:
Shigeto Kawahara, Aaron Braver
KEYWORDS:
Vowel Length; Duration; Emphasis; Japanese; (Non-)Binarity
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.3 No.2,
June
13,
2013
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.