Segmental Lengthening in Spontaneous Japanese: Durational Variations and the Effect of Contexts

Abstract

This paper studies the lengthening of Japanese speech segments taken from a picture description task. The results show a much higher occurrence of lengthening than previous studies. The degree of lengthening in each utterance was on the average 2.16 times as long as the mean duration of the preceding morae in that utterance. Almost 90% of substantial lengthening occurred at the phrase-final position of the bunsetsu. The contexts of lengthening suggest that the lengthening within bunsetsu phrases may be caused by hesitation, while bunsetsu-final lengthening may play a role in both clarifying the syntactic boundary and making speech more rhythmical.