Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Abstract

Nishimura (2003) first pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates devoice optionally when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent i.e. when they violate OCP(voice) (e.g. /baggu/ → [bakku] 'bag'). This devoicing of geminates has been used to make several theoretical claims in the recent phonological literature. However, these claims have so far largely been based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (in press) addressed this problem by conducting a rating study. The first aim of this study, building on Kawahara (in press), is to further support the empirical foundation of these theoretical claims by way of a large-scale rating study. The current study shows that (i) the OCP and geminacy each affect naturalness rating of devoicing, and (ii) that there is nevertheless something special about the combination of the OCP and geminacy.The second aim is to test an assumption behind the recent literature on this phenomenon.The assumption is that this devoicing pattern is monolithic-i.e. all voiced geminates uniformly undergo devoicing in a certain phonological environment. The current experiment shows that this assumption is too simplistic. In particular it shows (i) speakers rate the devoicing of affricates as natural as that of stops, (ii) speakers find devoicing of items that merge with other lexical items less natural, (iii) speakers rate devoicing as more natural when there are multiple triggers, (iv) speakers find devoicing of [dd] more natural than that of [gg], and (v) speakers find devoicing of more frequent items more natural.2

Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects

“…It is beyond the scope of this paper to settle these debates; however, to briefly summarize, the devoicing pattern triggered three major theoretical debates: (i) how to explain the difference between singletons (=the data in (3)) and geminates (=the data in (1)) (Kawahara 2006(Kawahara , 2008Rice 2006;Steriade 2004); (ii) how to capture the cumulative markedness requirement of devoicing in (1) (Farris-Trimble 2008;Nishimura 2003;Pater 2009, forthcoming;Tesar 2007);and (iii) how the spontaneous emergence of loanword devoicing in (1) bears on the theory of lexical stratification-a theory of how loanword phonology is related to native phonology (Crawford 2009;Mester 2003, 2008;Tateishi 2002). See Kawahara (2011a) and Kawahara (2012a) for recent summaries (the former in English and the latter in Japanese).…”

“…First, both Kawahara (2011a) and Kawahara (2011b) used only real words. In the case of Japanese loanword devoicing, it is of some interest to investigate whether the results obtained for real words generalize to nonce words.…”

“…The first aim of this paper is to therefore re-examine Experiment III of to mainly address the question of whether the results obtained in Kawahara (2011a) and Kawahara (2011b) can be replicated with nonce words. This report also allows us to compare the results of that experiment with two other experiments reported in the paper.…”

“…Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b found that Japanese speakers distinguish the naturalness of two processes that were both judged to be "ungrammatical" by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006), with the devoicing of non-OCP violating geminates (=the examples in (2)) rated as more natural than the devoicing of OCPviolating singletons (=(3)). One may wonder whether this gradient effect was due to a task effect; the reason being that Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b) uses a gradient scale. Testing this issue is in part motivated by the debate concerning the gradient nature of phonological judgments.…”

“…However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b addressed this issue by conducting rating studies using naive native speakers of Japanese. The results generally supported the intuition-based data by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006).…”