15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
We investigated the role of foot structure on mora duration in Japanese. Out initial hypothesis was that moras in foot-final position are longer than moras in the same foot. Ten speakers of Tokyo Japanese read a set of surnames of the form CVCVCVCV, in which the second and fourth CVs were seen to correspond to foot-final moras. The analysis showed no support for foot-final mora lengthening. However, we found evidence for word-final lengthening and within-mora/between-mora duration compensation. Though not conclusively, the results are consistent with the interpretation that the bimoraic foot constitutes a domain of compensation effects of mora duration in Japanese.
Bibliographic reference. Ota, Mitsuhiko / Ladd, D. Robert / Tsuchiya, Madoka (2003): "Effects of foot structure on mora duration in Japanese?", In ICPhS-15, 459-462.