Abstract
Although the claim has been repeated that some version of “sound hierarchy” is indispensable in the field of phonology, no one has so far offered enough data to prove it.
I conducted the statistical investigations to support explicitly the order of “Japanese sound hierarchy” using the artificial onomatopoetic words of AB-type. 582 college students who were mainly from Western Japan were asked if they could find a preferred order in“ pira-pura vs. pura-pira, ” for example. Chi-square test was used to certify the significance levels of all the minimally contrastive pairs that were grouped into 87 terms. Then, the results were combined to obtain the following.
Vowel Hierarchy: i<u<e<a<o
Consonant Hierarchy: glides<liquids<nanals<fricatives<stops<affricates
In addition, the double-function system was introduced to some exceptional sounds in the consonant hierarchy.
