Incidence of Monosyllables in Japanese Conversation

Abstract

Incidence of monosyulables was studied in Japanese scenario for teleplays. The incidences of the monosyllables were 19.3% for vowels without consonants, 84.7% for consonants with vowels and 6.0% for /n/ without vowels. Consonants having higher incidences were /t/, /k/, /n/, /s/ and /r/. Discrepancies were evaluated between distributions of the monosyllable incidences in Japanese conversation and those in word lists for speech discrimination tests, such as 57S list, 67S list, 100 monosyllable list and 14VCV list. The discrepancy was smallest in the 57S list. To evaluate the understanding ability of conversation from the results of discrimination tests, the results must be interpreted by taking account of the incidences of the monosyllables, especially in the 100 monosyllable list and the 14VCV list.