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KMID : 0917520010080040229
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Journal of Speech Sciences
2001 Volume.8 No. 4 p.229 ~ p.241
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Acoustical Analysis of Phonological Reduction in Conversational Japanese
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Abstract
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Using eighteen texts from various genera of present-day Japanese, I collected phonologically reduced forms frequently observed in conversational Japanese, and classified them in search of a unified explanation of phonological phenomena. I found 7,516 cases of reduced forms which I divided into 43 categories according to the types of phonological changes they have undergone.
The general tendencies are that deletion and fusion of a phoneme or an entire syllable takes place frequently, resulting in the decrease in the number of syllables. From a morphosyntctic point of view, phonological reduction often occurs at the NP and VP morpheme boundaries.
The following findings are drawn from phonetical observations of reduction. (1) Vowels are more easily deleted than consonants. (2) Bilabials ([m], [b], and [w]) are the most likely candidates for deletion. (3) In a concatenation of vowels, closed vowels are absorbed into open vowels, or two adjacent vowels come to create another vowel, in which case reconstruction of the original sequence is not always predicatable. (4) Alveolars are palatalized under the influence of front vowels. (5) Regressive assimilation takes place in a syllable starting with [r], changing the entire syllable into a phonological choked sound or a syllabic nasal, depending on the voicing of the following phoneme.
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