Voicing and geminacy in Japanese: An acoustic and perceptual study

Maintaining voicing in obstruents is articulatorily challenging. During obstruent closure, intraoral air pressure goes up quickly, and as a consequence it becomes difficult to maintain a sufficient transglottal air pressure drop to produce voicing. This difficulty becomes more problematic in geminates, which have long closures (Hayes and Steriade 2004; Jaeger 1978; Ohala 1983; Westbury 1979). Reflecting this articulatory difficulty, historically, Japanese allowed no voiced geminates. Various alternations support this distributional restriction. Coda nasalization in mimetic gemination in (1b) is induced to avoid voiced geminates (Kuroda 1965; Itô and Mester 1999). A root-final vowel in SinoJapanese is syncopated in compounds, with subsequent place assimilation of the rootfinal consonant to the following consonant, as shown in (2a) (Itô and Mester 1996); however, such syncope is blocked when it would result in a voiced geminate, as in (2b):