Abstract
The glottal opening pattern during /CVC/ (voiceless consonant- vowel- voiceless consonant) sequences was examined using photoelectric glottography (PGG). The subject was a male speaker of Osaka dialect whose devoicing rate is less frequent than speakers of Tokyo dialect (standard Japanese). Results revealed that, for many of the devoiced tokens, the glottal opening showed a bimodal pattern, i.e. two independent openings, each corresponding to a voiceless consonant overlapping with each other and accompanied by a closing movement in between. This pattern differs from the mono-modal pattern for the Tokyo speakers in previous studies, in which higher level control of speech production is presumably involved. This suggests that the devoicing of the Osaka speaker in question is not controlled by a categorically-determined command such as phonological rules. The results also demonstrated that the degree of glottal opening was greater for fricatives than for stops, and in word initial than in word medial position. This is consistent with previous studies, suggesting that these features are common to Tokyo and Osaka speakers.
