7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing September 16-20, 2002 Denver, Colorado, USA

Contextual Effects on Voicing Judgment of Stop Consonants in Japanese

Makiko Aoyagi

Sophia University, Japan

A perception experiment on stop consonant voicing in (C)V1CV2 was conducted to test the effects of the preceding vowel. Five types of /ki/ as CV1 differing in closure voicing, vowel duration and vowel devoicing were spliced with a da-ta VOT continuum as CV2. Subjects’ judgment between the spliced kita and kida along a VOT range was compared with that of ta and da in isolation. Strong effects of closure voicing and vowel devoicing were observed. More importantly, voicing judgment gradually shifted towards voiceless with the gradual reduction of the preceding vowel, indicating the parallelism of phonetic, gradient vowel reduction and its perception.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Aoyagi, Makiko (2002): "Contextual effects on voicing judgment of stop consonants in Japanese", In ICSLP-2002, 1129-1132.