Cue-specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation: evidence from the voicing contrast in Japanese

Abstract In natural speech, phonetic cues that distinguish lexical items can be hyperarticulated when there is a minimal pair competitor, a process known as contrastive hyperarticulation. Building upon prior work, this article examines the cue-specific nature of contrastive hyperarticulation in Japanese, focussing on stop voice onset time (VOT) using a speech corpus. We confirmed that the existence of a voicing minimal pair competitor in the lexicon triggers hyperarticulation of VOT duration on the target segment (shorter for voiced stops and longer for voiceless stops), while other contrasts (singleton vs. geminate) did not. The results also suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation (a) is more compatible with casual speech than slow/clear speech, (b) is sensitive to position in a word (greater in word-initial position than in non-initial position) and (c) applies to a greater degree in Japanese than in English due to properties of stops. This provides further evidence that the phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation is cross-linguistically relevant.