Abstract
The present study is concerned with the voicing contrasts of stop consonants in Japanese and English, and examines phonetic characteristics of their contrasts. The examination is mainly based on the acoustic analysis of initial stops in the two languages. Based on the analysis, it can be said that Japanese and English use several acoustic features such as voice onset time (VOT), Fo and its curve, and the onset of the first formant frequency for distinguishing voicing contrasts. Phonetic differences of the voicing contrasts in the two languages can be represented by the selection of the laryngeal features /VOICE, ASPIRATED, TENSE/, and the implementation of these selected features.
