Acoustic and prosodic analysis of Japanese vowel-vowel hiatus with laryngeal effect

We investigated V-V hiatus through J-ToBI labeling and listening to whole phrases to estimate degree of discontinuity and to determine the exact boundary between two phrases if possible. Appropriate boundaries were found in most cases as the maximum perceptual score. Using electroglottography (EGG) and spectrogram, the acoustic phonological feature of these V-V hiatus was phrase-initial glottalization and phrasefinal nasalization observable in EGG and spectrogram, as well as phrase-final lengthening and phrase-initial shortening. The test materials are taken from the "Japanese MULTEXT", consisting of a particle vowel (36), adjective vowel (5), and word word (4).