Summary

This project investigates the phonetic and phonological aspects of Japanese with main focus on sokuon (geminate consonants), accent and rendaku (sequential voicing), with a view to clarifying the main characteristics of the language in comparison with other languages of the world. Regarding sokuon, the project attempts to illuminate the rhythmic structure of Japanese and the perceptual strategies that its native speakers employ by revealing the linguistic conditions on sokuon in loanwords and their phonetic/phonological basis. Results of this study can hopefully be applied to the teaching of Japanese as a second language as well as to education for people with language impairments. Research on accent, on the other hand, studies the prosodic systems of a variety of Japanese dialects in comparison with those of other accent and tone languages in the world such as Korean, Chinese and Swahili. The project also analyzes the mechanism of rendaku and its relation to syntactic and semantic structures.

The main activities of this research project include research meetings and international symposia, both of which are held on a regular basis. Its research results will be presented at the international symposia and published in English in the form of a monograph from a domestic or overseas publisher. This project is also carried out in close collaboration with the research project led by Nobuko Kibe on endangered Japanese dialects, supporting and reinforcing this descriptive project from theoretical and cross-linguistic viewpoints.