Morphological (Non-)Effect in High Vowel Devoicing in Japanese

Abstract

In some phonological theories, word-internal information as being visible in the post-lexical domain is not expected. This study takes up high vowel devoicing in Japanese, a post-lexical process, and investigates whether morphological structure may have an effect in its application. The results of a corpus study using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese suggest that the word-internal boundary investigated herein has an effect on the devoicing likelihood but not in an across-the-board way and that phonological factors have an effect. It is proposed that what seems to be reference to morphology may in fact be analyzed as being phonological.