The empathetic utterance-final particle -<i>ne</i> in Japanese: a study on its phonological representation

Abstract Utterance-final particles (UFPs) in Japanese can be immediately preceded by any lexical item, and can carry various tonal contours, each conveying nuanced meanings in discourse. This paper focuses on the empathetic UFP - ne , investigating its phonological representation (rather than its morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic representation) based on its usage as established in the literature. While traditionally viewed as a consonant-vowel sequence, our experimental data recorded by a total of 66 typically developed native Japanese speakers reveals the empathetic - ne has a consistently longer duration than the non-empathetic - yo . This paper proposes to represent the vowel of - ne as a structural configuration containing two tone-bearing units (e.g., VV or μμ), and focuses on the infrequent use of this structure among individuals with higher autistic tendencies, specifically in terms of difficulties with social skills.