Abstract
This study investigated acoustic cues distinguishing between Japanese single and geminate voiceless consonants /p, t, s/ across different speech rates. Results for the two ratios, a consonant to a preceding vowel (C/V1) and a consonant to a preceding mora (C/M1), show that distributions for a singleton and a geminate are clearly distinct in the latter case only. Also, duration ratio of a consonant to its following vowel (C/V2) is found to play an important role in the distinction, results showing no overlapping between a singleton and a geminate.
