F-2 A Correlate between Production and Perception in Finnish and Japanese

in Finnish and Japanese Toshiko Isei-Jaakkola 0. Introduction Japanese can be compared to Finnish because these two languages share the quantity differences of vowels and consonants as a common feature, and these are linguistically distinctive. However, it has been claimed that their speech rhythm is different. Finnish has a trochaic rhythm and only in this sense, can Finnish be said to be stress-timed. In these languages the syllable structures are different. Japanese is said to be a mora-counting and pitch-accented language. In Japanese (Tokyo dialect) there are only three types of mora (V, CV, C). On the other hand there are ten kinds of syllables in Finnish. According to the hypothesis of stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed languages the peak of sonorousness can be perceived isochronically. The basis of this hypothesis has long been mainly durational analysis. Bearing in mind these rhythmic issues, I investigated Japanese and Finnish as to whether a correlation can be found between their production and perception in terms of the duration of bisyllabic words, by changing syllable structures based in my acoustic experiments. My aim is mainly to compare temporal distribution of syllables (moras) in a word rather than to compare segmental quantity. Finnish has bisyllabic real words comprising maximally of eight different kinds of syllable structures produced by combinations of short/long vowels and short/long consonants — CVCV, CVCVV, CVVCV, CVVCVV, CVCCV, CVCCVV, CVVCCV, CVVCCVV. On the other hand, Japanese can have seven such, except for CVVCCVV. Neither of these two languages share words which have combinations of exactly the same short/long vowels and consonants. Thus, in the experiments, my decision was to use bisyllabic nonsense-words containing V /a-aa/ and C-CC /p-pp/, /m-mm/ and /s-ss/, in which both Finnish (F) and Japanese (J) make a contrast between singleton and geminate, in both production and perception. In the perception, I took into consideration fundamental frequency (F0) variants and intensity (dB) variants. Informants and subjects were Tokyo dialect speakers and Hame dialect speakers respectively. 1. Production These nonsense words in a carrier sentence ÒSanokaa ___ taas yhden kerran. Ó (F) ÒMooikkai ___ to itte kudasai. Ó (J) (=Please say ___ once more.) were read five times by each informant respectively. The spectrogram was mainly used to measure the segmental duration on SoundScope 2.32. Then, segmental, syllabic (moraic), and word duration were calculated. The tokens were 240 lexical tokens and 960 segmental tokens. As a result, the ratios between /a/ and /aa/ were 1:2.14 (F) vs 1:2.45 (J). The ratios between word-medial /p, m, s,/ and their counterparts /pp, mm, ss,/ were 1:1.90 (F), 1:2.07 (J), 1:1.62(F), 1:2.40(J), 1:1.71(F), 1:1.85(J) respectively. Thus, the Japanese segmental ratios between singleton and geminate in both vowels and consonants are longer than those of Finnish. Compared to the respective moraic ratio based upon the Japanese mora-coutning concept, the Finnish extrinsic ratio of each mora was shorter than in Japanese. The significant value on overall intrinsic moraic ratio were 85-131% for Lexical Durational Distribution in CV(V)C(C)V(V)