An investigation of vowel devoicing and prosodic structure in Japanese

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In this project, I investigated vowel devoicing, a well-studied phonological feature of Japanese, focusing on its interaction with prosodic structure, a relatively unexplored area in the literature. The following two findings comprise the main contribution of my project.First, I conducted a perception experiment to test whether Japanese speakers can hear accent contrasts between words involving accents on devoiced vowels. I found that although participants could hear the contrasts fairly well overall, one contrast type was harder to detect than others, suggesting a bias in perception toward certain accent patterns.Second, I carried out a dictionary survey and production experiment to discover whether vowel devoicing would be affected by morphological information such as word-internal boundaries, as claimed in the literature. The results suggest that it is not the morphology but rather phonology, specifically prosodic information, that affects vowel devoicing in Japanese.