Preciseness of Temporal Compensation in Japanese Mora Timing

This study was motivated by a hypothesis that mora-timed Japanese would show a stronger tendency to keep CV length equal than other languages, because CV must not be too long in Japanese where CV and CVC / CVV have a durational contrast. Thus from this hypothesis, the magnitude and preciseness of the temporal compensation effect is expected to be larger for Japanese than those for other languages. Previous studies only examined the existence of temporal compensation; the issue of how differently temporal compensation is performed depending on a language has not been considered. Comparing Japanese with Korean and Chinese that have different timing patterns from Japanese, the results of this study confirmed the above hypothesis holds true at least within the speech context in this experiment. The magnitude of V changes to compensate for the C differences was larger in Japanese than the other two languages. Furthermore such temporal compensation was more consistently performed, resulting in stable CV length.