Geminate Devoicing in Japanese Loanwords: Theoretical and Experimental Investigations

This paper provides an overview of theoretical and experimental investigations of voiced geminates in Japanese. Active discussion was initiated by Nishimura’s (2003) discovery that in Japanese loanword phonology, voiced geminates can be devoiced, when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → /dokku/). This context-sensitive devoicing of geminates has received much theoretical attention since then, and has been analyzed within several different theoretical frameworks. Subsequently, the phonetic and psycholinguistic natures of voiced geminates have also been explored, in tandem with corpus-based analyses and computational modeling. It thus seems safe to say that this devoicing pattern of voiced geminates in Japanese has had some substantial impacts in the recent theoretical literature and related field. The empirical focus of this paper is on one simple devoicing phenomenon in Japanese, but implications for general linguistic theories are discussed throughout. 1 The basic patterns 1.1 Prohibition of voiced geminates in native phonology In Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates (/bb, dd, gg/) are not allowed in the native phonology (Ito & Mester, 1999). Not only do they not make lexical contrasts, some evidence from phonological alternations shows that voiced geminates are actively avoided. For example, the suffix /-ri/, when attached to mimetic roots, causes gemination of root final consonants, as in (1). However, when the root-final consonants are voiced obstruents, gemination is blocked, and a nasal is inserted instead, as in (2) (Ito & Mester, 1999). (1) Gemination caused by /-ri/ a. /uka+ri/ → /ukkari/ ‘absent-mindedly’ This paper uses phonemic transcription (Vance, 2008) rather than IPA transcriptions except where phonetic details are relevant.