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This book is the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants, a feature of many of the world's languages including Arabic, Bengali, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Saami, Swiss German, and Turkish. While the contrast between geminate and singleton consonants has been widely studied, the phonetic manifestation and phonological nature of geminate consonants, as well as their cross-linguistic similarities and differences, are not fully understood.
The volume brings together original data and novel analyses of geminate consonants in a variety of languages across the world. Experts in the field present a wide range of approaches to the study of phonological contrasts in general by introducing various experimental and non-experimental methodologies; they also discuss phonological contrasts in a wider context and examine the behaviour of geminate consonants in loanword phonology and language acquisition. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, speech processing, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition.
List of contents
- Introduction
- PART I: Production and Perception of Geminate Consonants
- 1: Shigeto Kawahara and Melanie Pangilinan: Spectral continuity, amplitude changes, and perception of length contrasts
- 2: Olga Dmitrieva: Production of geminate consonants in Russian: Implications for typology
- 3: Rachid Ridouane and Pierre A. Hallé: Word-initial geminates: From production to perception
- 4: Hajime Takeyasu and Mikio Giriko: Effects of duration and phonological length of the preceding/following segments on perception of the length contrast in Japanese
- 5: Anders Löfqvist: Articulatory coordination in long and short consonants - an effect of rhythm class?
- 6: Elinor Payne, Brechtje Post, Nina Gram Garmann, and Hanne Gram Simonsen: The acquisition of long consonants in Norwegian
- 7: Yukari Hirata: Second language learners' production of geminate consonants in Japanese
- PART II: Phonology of Geminate Consonants
- 8: Sandra Kotzor, Allison Wetterlin, and Aditi Lahiri: Bengali geminates: processing and representation
- 9: Lara Ehrenhofer, Adam C. Roberts, Sandra Kotzor, Allison Wetterlin and Aditi Lahiri: Asymmetric processing of consonant duration in Swiss German
- 10: Stuart Davis: Geminates and weight manipulating phonology in Chuukese (Trukese)
- 11: Nina Topintzi and Stuart Davis: On the weight of edge geminates
- 12: Junko Ito, Haruo Kubozono and Armin Mester: A prosodic account of consonant gemination in Japanese loanwords
- 13: Shin'ichi Tanaka: The relation between L2 perception and L1 phonology in Japanese loanwords: An analysis of geminates in loanwords from Italian
- 14: Hyunsoon Kim: Korean speakers' perception of Japanese geminates: Evidence for an L1 grammar-driven borrowing process
- References
- Index
About the author
Haruo Kubozono completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1988. He taught phonetics and phonology at Nanzan University, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, and Kobe University before moving to the National Institute for Japanese Languages and Linguistics as Professor/Director in 2010. His research interests range from speech disfluencies to speech prosody and its interfaces with syntax and information structure. He recently edited The Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology (2015, De Gruyter Mouton) as well as special issues on pitch accent and geminate consonants in Lingua (2012) and Journal of East Asian Linguistics (2013), respectively.
Summary
This book is the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetic manifestation and phonological nature of geminate, or 'long', consonants, a feature of many of the world's languages including Arabic, Bengali, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Saami, Swiss German, and Turkish.
Additional text
This book stands out in terms of the range of languages and perspectives covered ... fascinating, and a definite must-read for phoneticians and phonologists exploring the linguistic nature of gemination.
Report
The book is excellent... It is important reading for anyone who works on the phonology of geminates, but its appeal is far wider than that might suggest. Because of the thorny empirical and theoretical issues raised by length contrasts, in particular concerning the relationship between phonetic properties and abstract phonological ones, this book will be interesting to anyone concerned with the boundary areas between phonetics and phonology. Jonah Katz, Phonology
