EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE: A PHONETIC STUDY OF NONSTANDARD USE OF A DIACRITIC FOR VOICED OBSTRUENTS IN JAPANESE

Keiko Masuda
Chuo University

ID 1182
[full paper]

This paper investigates phonetic features of vowels with a diacritic for voiced obstruents (dakuten) in Japanese, which are phonologically and orthographically nonstandard but often observed recently in informal linguistic media. Recorded data of the vowels were analysed in terms of auditory impression, visual inspection, formant frequencies, phonation type, F0 and acoustic intensity. It was revealed that the productions of /a/ with a dakuten exhibited positive spectral tilt in the low frequency range and lowering of F0, both of which are indicative of creaky voice. On the other hand, increase in acoustic intensity, which has been claimed by some previous work, was not clearly observed in this analysis.