Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to analyse the sociolinguistic variation of vowel devoicing using the CSJ. Age, gender and speech style variation has been analysed for different phonological environments. Particular attention will be given to atypical environments which showed a higher rate of variability.

Paper long abstract:

Maekawa and Kikuchi (2005) used the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (henceforth "CSJ") to analyse the frequency of vowel devoicing in different phonological environments. According to their analysis, the devoicing rate is highest when a fricative is followed by a stop and lowest when an affricate is followed by a fricative. Moreover, the results of their study suggest that devoicing also occurs in atypical environments, as in non-high vowels and in contexts where a vowel is followed by a voiced consonant. The use of a large corpus, which fully covers all the C1-C2 combinations, has permitted to produce one of the most reliable resource for the study of vowel devoicing. The frequency of devoicing is conditioned not only by phonological factors but, at a certain extent, also by extra-linguistic and sociological factors such as age, gender and speech style. Previous studies pointed out, for example, that devoicing is decreasing in young generation (Hirayama 1998), is more frequent for young males (Imai 2010) and is highly frequent in conversational speech as compared to controlled speech (Komatsu and Aoyagi 2005). However, this kind of researches makes use of experimental designed data which are not large enough for a complete analysis that covers all the phonological environments.

This paper aims to analyse the sociolinguistic variation of vowel devoicing in spontaneous Japanese using the CSJ-Core consisting of about 45 hours of speech, all of which have been (sub-)phonemically segmented. Age, gender and speech style variation has been analysed for different phonological environments and different C1-C2 combinations. Particular attention will be given to atypical environments which showed a higher rate of variability. A straightforward gender difference has been observed, for example, when devoicing occurs in contexts where the devoiced vowel is followed by a nasal consonant: the devoicing rate of /u/ in the /CVN/ environment is 20.84% for male and 12.31% for female. As for age graded-variation, devoicing of high vowels on accented moras is relatively more frequent for middle generation of speakers (45-54).