Evidence for mora timing in Japanese

Abstract

Japanese has long been described as a "mora-timed" language by linguists. Japanese pedagogy has traditionally claimed that moras are constant in duration. Four experiments are reported investigating segmental timing in Japanese in order to test several straightforward hypotheses about mora timing. First, it is demonstrated that words with an increasing number of moras increase in duration by nearly constant increments. The next two experiments explored the mechanisms by which constant mora durations are achieved given that there are large universal differences in the inherent duration of various segment types (e.g., /u/vs/a/), and given that some syllables are supposed to be two mora long (such as, those with long vowels or final consonants). In each case, it was found that the duration of a word stays very close to a target duration that depends on the number of moras in it. This is achieved by stretching or compressing the duration of neighboring segments and adjacent moras. Thus increasing the number of segments in two-mora syllables results in lengthening, not the expected shortening, of other segments in the heavier syllable.

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

“…Pike (1945) thus renamed the two types of rhythms "syllable-timed" and "stress-timed", and Abercrombie (1967) went a step further by claiming that linguistic rhythm was either based on the isochrony of syllables, or on the isochrony of interstress intervals, for all languages throughout the world. Further work generally classified Germanic and Slavonic languages, as well as Arabic, as stress-timed, Romance languages as syllable-timed, and hypothesized a third category of mora-timed languages, including Japanese and Tamil (Abercrombie, 1967;Bertinetto, 1989;Ladefoged, 1975;Pike, 1945;Port, Dalby, & O'Dell, 1987;Rubach & Booij, 1985;Steever, 1987).…”

The functional unit of Japanese word naming: Evidence from masked priming.

“…In fact, Schiller (1998) found that the more segments overlap between prime and target, the more priming will be obtained in Dutch, leading to the segmental overlap hypothesis (for similar findings in English, see Schiller, 2000). In the current study, we aim to extend the discussion of languagespecific functional units to Japanese, a language that has been argued to be mora timed, in contrast to stress-timed Dutch and English and syllable-timed French and Chinese (see Port, Dalby, & O'Dell, 1987;Warner & Arai, 2001).…”

Syllabification patterns in Arabic dialects: long segments and mora sharing

“…work on ' compensatory shortening ' in English by Munhall et al (1992), which demonstrates both that vowels are shorter before consonant clusters and that codas are shorter after long vowels ; consider also work by Port et al (1987) on Japanese, which shows that the duration of a word depends on the number of moras and that where vowels are longer, consonants are compensatorily shortened. 17 In the tableaux below, only immediately relevant constraints are given.…”