Experimental phonological study on Japanese geminates

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Our research has tried to reveal the conditions of occurrences and non-occurrences of geminates in Japanese loanwords and the linguistic principles governing these conditions by the phonetic experiments and the phonological theory. The experimental evidence has shown that the perception of geminate obstruents by native speakers of Japanese is determined not only by the duration of the consonant itself but also by formant transitions in the case of voiceless fricatives as well as the pitch of the relevant syllable, but not by the release of the consonant, and is determined by the stress when the donor language is Italian. Onset structures of the source language affect geminate perception, but this is not due to the phonetic quality of the coda consonant. Furthermore, the tendency of geminate obstruents to occur at or near the end of the word can be attributed to the phonetic features of the donor language(English) rather than the phonological structure of the host language(Japanese).