The present study investigated whether the articulation ability and speech rate control of people who stutter (PWS) were different from people who do not stutter (PWNS). Twenty PWS and 20 PWNS performed oral reading and speech shadowing. Speech / articulation rates, the number and duration of pauses were analyzed. PWS showed slower articulation rate and with more pauses than PWNS during oral reading, but not during speech shadowing. This suggests that PWS control speech differently under the two conditions. Furthermore, PWS showed a significantly negative correlation between articulation rate and number of pauses during oral reading.

The present study utilized Japanese and Mandarin Chinese emotional speech representing eight emotion types (happy, hot anger, cold anger, sad, surprised, afraid, disgusted, neutral) from Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners of L2 Japanese, to clarify crosslinguistic differences in emotional speech. Spectral analysis revealed different patterns of utterances by Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners. Chinese learners tend to use a tenser glottal configuration to express cold anger, happy, hot anger and sad. Furthermore, open quotient-valued voice range profiles based on Electroglottography signals suggest that the emotional speech from Mandarin Chinese learners are affected by their mother tongue.

In the Onotsu dialect of Kikai Ryukyuan, address nouns such as kinship terms and personal names exhibit peculiar behavior in terms of vowel length alternation and tonal patterns. This paper describes the phonological characteristics of address nouns, and argues that vocative falling intonation effected diachronic changes in the lexical features of the address nouns. The hypothesis proposed in this paper is that address nouns underwent two sequential changes: accent shift, and vowel lengthening. The latter is presumed to have been partly prevented by the least phonologically independent particles, which has resulted in the peculiar characteristics of address nouns.

This study investigated the developmental changes in Japanese children’s speech inaccuracies through an elicited production task. The difficulty of segments, complexity of words in which the segments were embedded, and length of carrier sentences, were manipulated. The results revealed that inaccuracies occurred significantly more frequently in children aged 9 years and younger than in older children and adults. An increase in the number of syllables within a word and the length of the carrier sentences, but not in morae, increased the occurrence of inaccuracies. However, the difficulty of the segments showed a complex relationship with inaccurate speech.

The accent pattern of Japanese compound nouns is classified into two types: fusion (where the accents are fused into a single unit with the middle-high form as a whole) or a non-fusion (the accents are not fused into a single middle-high form as a whole). Some compound nouns have both fusion and non-fusion accents. In this study, a listening survey was conducted to investigate whether the use of fusion and non-fusion accents is affected by the focus on the meaning of the posterior element. The results show that the naturalness of non-fusion accents increases when the focus is on the action or state of the posterior element; however, the naturalness of fusion accents does not change.

This study aimed to investigate the phonetic characteristics and allophonic conditioning of Bengali voiceless sibilants. We measured M1 (weighted average) and M2 (standard deviation) through a spectral moment analysis of fricative spectra and the F2 of post-consonantal vowels with data collected from four native speakers. The analysis suggests that allophonic [s] typically appears at the onset of word-initial consonant clusters. It also reveals individual differences in allophonic conditioning. The comparison between our results and previous studies of Mandarin Chinese voiceless sibilants suggests that Bengali /ʃ/ is phonetically closer to Mandarin Chinese /ʂ/ than /ɕ/.

Japanese learners of Spanish often fail to perceive lexical stress in rising intonation contexts, although they tend to perceive stress correctly in falling intonation contexts. A perception experiment, conducted with two groups of listeners (L1 Spanish speakers and Japanese learners of L3 Spanish), revealed that the timing of the sharp f_o rise was the most important acoustic cue for both of the listener groups. Syllable duration was also found to have a positive effect on stress perception, but the effect was weaker for the Japanese listeners.

The purpose of this study is to report on an experiment that examined whether labial consonants evoked images of softness and cuteness in Chinese and Korean and to discuss cross-linguistic similarities and differences in sound-symbolic associations. The main findings of the study were: 1) not all labial consonants were associated with such images in Chinese and Korean; 2) the labial consonants judged appropriate for a ‘soft’ image were always judged appropriate for a ‘cute’ image in both Chinese and Korean as well as in Japanese; and 3) the bilabial sonorant [m] evoked images of softness and cuteness in Chinese and Korean as well as in Japanese and English.

To clarify the characteristics of Thai speakers’ mispronunciation of Japanese singleton and geminate stops, durations of the closure and the preceding and following consonant-vowel segments were analyzed. Compared with native Japanese speakers, Thai speakers mispronounced singleton stops with a longer closure and a shorter preceding consonant-vowel segment. They also mispronounced geminate stops with a shorter closure and a longer following consonant-vowel segment. These results are consistent with a previous study of Korean and Taiwanese Mandarin speakers, suggesting that non-native speakers commonly mispronounce Japanese singleton and geminate stops with inadequate durations of a closure segment and preceding and following consonant-vowel segments.

The voicing contrast for Japanese word-initial stops is primarily realized as differences in the Voice Onset Time (VOT). However, previous studies have pointed out that VOT alone cannot differentiate the two stop categories because their VOT values overlap. A few studies have attempted to find another characteristic by examining post-stop fo and voice quality but have failed to find an answer. This study investigated VOT and post-stop fo using data drawn from eighty-two native speakers from four regions. The result shows that post-stop fo differences can distinguish the two categories, but not alone. The acoustic space of VOT and post-stop fo demonstrates a clear distinction between the two categories, while the effect of VOT and post-stop fo on voicing contrast differs from region to region. The result of this study provides evidence that post-stop fo functions as an acoustic characteristic responsible for voicing contrast along with VOT.