Evidence for mora timing in Japanese

Abstract

Japanese has long been described as a "mora-timed" language by linguists. Japanese pedagogy has traditionally claimed that moras are constant in duration. Four experiments are reported investigating segmental timing in Japanese in order to test several straightforward hypotheses about mora timing. First, it is demonstrated that words with an increasing number of moras increase in duration by nearly constant increments. The next two experiments explored the mechanisms by which constant mora durations are achieved given that there are large universal differences in the inherent duration of various segment types (e.g., /u/vs/a/), and given that some syllables are supposed to be two mora long (such as, those with long vowels or final consonants). In each case, it was found that the duration of a word stays very close to a target duration that depends on the number of moras in it. This is achieved by stretching or compressing the duration of neighboring segments and adjacent moras. Thus increasing the number of segments in two-mora syllables results in lengthening, not the expected shortening, of other segments in the heavier syllable.

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