Papers - Kawahara, Shigeto

Acoustics of the four-way laryngeal contrast in Drenjongke (Bhutia): Observations and implications

Lee, Seunghun, Shigeto Kawahara, C´eleste Guillemot & Tomoko Monou

Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan 23 ( 1 ) 65 - 75 2019.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Inferring Pokémon types using sound symbolism: The effects of voicing and labiality

Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai

Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan  2019

Accounting for the stochastic nature of sound symbolism using Maximum Entropy model

Kawahara, Shigeto, Hironori Katsuda & Gakuji Kumagai

Open Linguistics (Open Linguistics)  5 ( 1 ) 109 - 120 2019

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© 2019 Shigeto Kawahara et al., published by Sciendo. Sound symbolism refers to stochastic and systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has not received much serious attention in the generative phonology literature, perhaps because most if not all sound symbolic patterns are probabilistic. Building on the recent proposal to analyze sound symbolic patterns within a formal phonological framework (Alderete and Kochetov 2017), this paper shows that MaxEnt grammars allow us to model stochastic sound symbolic patterns in a very natural way. The analyses presented in the paper show that sound symbolic relationships can be modeled in the same way that we model phonological patterns. We suggest that there is nothing fundamental that prohibits formal phonologists from analyzing sound symbolic patterns, and that studying sound symbolism using a formal framework may open up a new, interesting research domain. The current study also reports two hitherto unnoticed cases of sound symbolism, thereby expanding the empirical scope of sound symbolic patterns in natural languages.

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Expressing evolution in Pokémon names: Experimental explorations

Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai

Journal of Japanese Linguistics (Journal of Japanese Linguistics)  35 ( 1 ) 3 - 38 2019

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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. There has been a growing interest in sound symbolic patterns in natural languages, in which some sounds are associated with particular meanings. Previous corpus-based research identified some specific sound symbolic relationships in Pokémon naming patterns in Japanese (Kawahara et al. 2018b). One of the main findings was that the names of Pokémon characters are more likely to contain voiced obstruents, and are longer in terms of mora count, when the Pokémon characters undergo evolution (e.g. nyoromo → nyorozo; poppo → pijotto). The current study reports three experiments that test whether (i) these patterns are productive in the minds of general Japanese speakers, and whether (ii) the same tendency holds with English speakers. The results show that the effect of phonological length was clearly observed both with Japanese and English speakers; the effects of voiced obstruents were observed clearly with Japanese speakers, but less clearly with English speakers. Along the way, we address other general issues related to sound symbolism: (iii) to what extent the sound symbolic effects identified in Kawahara et al. (2018b) rely on familiarity with Pokémon, and (iv) whether word-initial segments invoke stronger images than word-internal segments. In addition to its research value, we emphasize that this general project on Pokémon names can be useful for undergraduate phonetics education.

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Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on vowel duration in Japanese

Shaw, Jason & Kawahara, Shigeto

Language and Speech  2019

Gotta Name’em All: an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese

Godoy M., de Souza Filho N., de Souza J., França H., Kawahara S.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research)  49 ( 5 ) 717 - 740 2019

ISSN  00906905

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© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Sound-symbolic patterns which relate to the perception of size were found to motivate the behavior of English and Japanese speakers in the naming of pre- and post-evolution Pokémon. The current study builds from this finding and investigates which sound-symbolic association speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) employ to name Pokémon characters. Results from 3 experiments show that vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents, usually used to signal differences in size, are used to signal differences in evolution; however, the effects of voiced obstruents are not identical to what was previously observed in the behavior of Japanese speakers. We argue that although there is a universal sound symbolism associated with these sounds and the perception of largeness, its manifestation differs cross-linguistically. To the best of our knowledge, this is one the first experimental research to investigate sound symbolism and the perception of size in BP.

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Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman's Law

Kawahara S.

Glossa (Glossa)  4 ( 1 )  2019

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This paper argues that phonology and orthography go in tandem with each other to shape our phonological behavior. More concretely, phonological operations are non-trivially affected by orthography, and phonological constraints can refer to them. The specific case study comes from a morphophonological alternation in Japanese, rendaku. Rendaku is a process by which the first consonant of the second member of a compound becomes voiced (e.g., /oo/ + /tako/ → [oo+dako] 'big octopus'). Lyman's Law blocks rendaku when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent (/oo/ + /tokage/ → ∗[oo+dokage], [oo+tokage] 'big lizard'). Lyman's Law, as a constraint which prohibits a morpheme with two voiced obstruents, is also known to trigger devoicing of geminates in loanwords (e.g. /beddo/ → [betto] 'bed'). Rendaku and Lyman's Law have been extensively studied in the past phonological literature. Inspired by recent work that shows the interplay between orthographic factors and grammatical factors in shaping our phonological behaviors, this paper proposes that rendaku and Lyman's Law actually operate on Japanese orthography. Rendaku is a process that assigns dakuten diacritics, and Lyman's Law prohibits morphemes with two diacritics. The paper shows that a set of properties of rendaku and Lyman's Law follows from this proposal. However, since some aspects of rendaku and Lyman's Law are undoubtedly phonological, the ultimate conclusion is that it is most fruitful to recognize a model of phonology in which it has access to orthographic information. Several consequences of the current proposal are discussed.

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Persistence of prosody

Kawahara, Shigeto and Jason Shaw

Hana-bana. A Festschrift for Junko Ito and Armin Mester  2018.10

Research paper (other academic), Joint Work, Accepted

Assessing feature specification in surface phonological representations through simulation and classification of phonetic data

SHAW, Jason and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Phonology 35 ( 2 ) 481 - 522 2018.09

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

有声性の研究はなぜ重要なのか

川原 繁人・高田三枝子・松浦年男・松井理直

音声研究 22 ( 2 )  2018.09

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work

Acquisition of sound symbolic values of vowels and voiced obstruents by Japanese children: Using a Pokémonastic paradigm

KAWAHARA Shigeto, Miwa Isobe, Yukino Kobayashi, Tomoko Monou and Reiko Okabe

Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan 22 ( 2 )  2018.09

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Assessing surface phonological specification through simulation and classification of phonetic trajectories

Shaw J., Kawahara S.

Phonology (Phonology)  35 ( 3 ) 481 - 522 2018.08

ISSN  09526757

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© Cambridge University Press 2018. Many previous studies have argued that phonology may leave some phonetic dimensions unspecified in surface representations. We introduce computational tools for assessing this possibility though simulation and classification of phonetic trajectories. The empirical material used to demonstrate the approach comes from electromagnetic articulography recordings of high-vowel devoicing in Japanese. Using Discrete Cosine Transform, tongue-dorsum movement trajectories are decomposed into a small number of frequency components (cosines differing in frequency and amplitude) that correspond to linguistically meaningful signal modulations, i.e. articulatory gestures. Stochastic generators of competing phonological hypotheses operate in this frequency space. Distributions over frequency components are used to simulate (i) the vowel-present trajectories and (ii) the vowel-absent trajectories. A Bayesian classifier trained on simulations assigns posterior probabilities to unseen data. Results indicate that /u/ is optionally produced without a vowel-height specification in Tokyo Japanese and that the frequency of such targetlessness varies systematically across phonological environments.

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Stochastic phonological knowledge and word formation in Japanese.

Kumagai, Gakuji and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan 153   57 - 84 2018.06

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Predictability and phonology: Past, present & future.

SHAW, Jason and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Linguistics Vanguard  2018.06

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Sound symbolic patterns in Pokémon names

KAWAHARA Shigeto, Atsushi Noto, and Gakuji Kumagai

Phonetica (Phonetica)  75 ( 3 ) 219 - 244 2018.05

Research paper (scientific journal), Accepted,  ISSN  00318388

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© 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel. This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokémon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokémon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight-Pokémon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns.

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The phonetic structure of Dzongkha: A preliminary study

LEE, Seunghun and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan  2018.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Durational vowel-coda interaction in spontaneous Japanese utterances

KAWAHARA Shigeto

Acoustical Science and Technology (Acoustical Science and Technology)  39 ( 2 ) 138 - 139 2018.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Single Work, Accepted,  ISSN  13463969

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Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on vowel duration in Japanese

Shaw Jason and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Language and Speech (Language and Speech)  62 ( 1 ) 80 - 114 2018.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Accepted,  ISSN  00238309

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© The Author(s) 2017. Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant–vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

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Truncation in Message-Oriented Phonology: The case of Korean vocative truncation

KAWAHARA Shigeto and Seunghun Lee

Linguistics Vanguard  2018.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Accepted

Opaque allomorph selection in Japanese and Harmonic Serialism: A reply to Kurisu (2012)

Hall Erin, Jurgec Peter, and KAWAHARA Shigeto

Linguistic Inquiry  2018.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Accepted