Sociolinguistic factors affecting vowel devoicing in spontaneous Japanese. A preliminary corpus-based analysis

Maekawa and Kikuchi (2005) used the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) to analyse the frequency of vowel devoicing in different phonological environments. According to their analysis, the devoicing rate is highest when a fricative is followed by a stop and lowest when an affricate is followed by a fricative. Moreover, the results of their study suggest that devoicing also occurs in atypical environments, as in non-close vowels and in contexts where a vowel is followed by a voiced consonant. However, the frequency of devoicing is conditioned not only by phonological factors but, at a certain extent, also by extra-linguistic and sociological factors such as age, gender and speech style. This paper aims to analyse the sociolinguistic variation of vowel devoicing in spontaneous Japanese using the CSJ- Core consisting of about 45 hours of speech, all of which have been (sub- )phonemically segmented. Age, gender and speech style variation has been analysed for different phonological environments. Particular attention will be given to atypical environments which showed a higher rate of variability.