title: Within- word prosodic constraint on coarticulation in Japanese.
abstract: The present study addresses the question of how within-word prosodic constituent boundaries constrain V-to-V coarticulation in Japanese. The smallest prosodic unit that might affect V-to-V coarticulation is the bimoraic foot. The effect of the foot boundary is observed in the present study: the bimoraic foot constrains the extent of V-to-V coarticulation in both left-to-right and right-to-left directions. For the target vowel /a/, anticipatory V-to-V effects are stronger than carryover effects for both within-foot and across-foot conditions. Also, the foot constraint works more strongly on anticipatory than on carryover effects. Some idiosyncratic variation is observed across speakers; however, even some deviant behavior can partly be explained as the result of the interaction of C-to-V and V-to-V effects and speech rate. Coarticulation is observed to be the product of a complex process of constraint interaction.
authors.affiliation: Tsuda College. nqi36906@nifty.com
authors.forename: Yuko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kondo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D014705:Verbal Behavior