Natsuya Yoshida: Some factors concerning vowel devoicing: consecutive vowel devoicing and 
morpheme/word boundary


As some researchers have pointed out, successive vowel devoicing is often 
avoided in Japanese (Vance 1992,Tsuchida 1997, and others). It has also been 
shown by various researches that there is a  dominant pattern of this 
avoiding. The aim of this brief survey is to test the relationship between 
consecutive vowel devoicing and morphological/word boundary. In this report, 
I conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, I chose the words 
having the same phonetic environment, but having different types of 
boundaries: morpheme or word boundaries. Using the acoustic analysis 
of the sound of these words, I examined the influence of the boundaries on 
vowel devoicing. In the next experiment, I selected the words containing 
successive vowel devoicing environments. And these words have the boundaries 
in these environments. Then I explored how these boundaries affect 
successive vowel devoicing.