14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Variation in Pre-Nasal Vowels in Osaka Japanese

Mechtild Tronnier

Department for Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden

This paper presents two studies on the production of vowels preceding the two nasal categories in Japanese, specifically Osaka Japanese. These two nasal categories are the mora nasal and the non-moraic nasal. As earlier studies have often focussed on the difference in length of the nasals themselves which were supposed to account for the ability to distinguish perceptually between the nasal categories, these studies focus on articulatory procedures which already take place anticipatorily in the preceding vowel. Variation in the quality of the preceding vowels is found to vary systematically and therefore is interpreted to serve as an indication about the nasal category to follow. The time course of anticipatory velar lowering on the other hand is not found to vary systematically and therefore it does not seem play an indicative role.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tronnier, Mechtild (1999): "Variation in pre-nasal vowels in Osaka Japanese", In ICPhS-14, 391-394.