Shigeto Kawahara
Biographic Data
| ID | 140647 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shigeto Kawahara |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shigeto |
| FAMILY NAME | Kawahara |
| SIGNATURE | KAWAHARA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keio University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9984-0576 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Smiles can be conveyed to listeners via speech signals: A case study with Japanese labiodentalization
One long-standing question in speech communication research concerns the extent to which an emotional state is encoded in the acoustic signal and conveyed to the listeners. To address this question, we deployed a recent finding in Japanese, in which speakers replace bilabial sounds (e.g. [b]) with labiodental sounds (e.g. [v]) when speaking with a smile. Experiment 1 used stimuli recorded by two professional voice actors under four conditions cro…
Sound symbolism can count three segments (whereas phonological constraints presumably cannot)
Some researchers have recently argued that sound-symbolic requirements can cause phonological alternations, suggesting that sound-symbolic patterns and phonological patterns may be governed by similar – or perhaps the same – mechanisms. Against this theoretical development, this article further addresses the question of how similar phonological systems and sound-symbolic systems are, by focusing on their counting capability. It has been establish…
Modelling frequency-conditioned paradigm uniformity in Japanese voiced velar nasalisation
Recent quantitative work on the variable [g]\~{}[ŋ] alternation in compounds of certain dialects of Japanese has revealed token frequency of the compound as a whole, and of the compound’s second member in its freestanding form, to be important predictors of the alternation. We propose a formal phonological analysis that integrates usage-based factors like frequency with the action of the phonological grammar, extending mechanisms of lexicon–gramm…
Token frequency modulates optional paradigm uniformity in Japanese voiced velar nasalisation
This article explores the role of token frequency and global prosodic length in conditioning optional paradigm uniformity in Japanese voiced velar nasalisation, with data from two wug -tests carried out with speakers of Tōhoku Japanese. Experiment 1 demonstrates that frequency-conditioning observed in corpus data is reproduced in existing and novel compounds and holds at the level of the speaker. Experiment 2 focuses on a typologically unusual pa…
Iconic prosody enhances the depictive power of ideophones
Prosody not only signals the speaker’s cognitive states but can also imitate various concepts. However, previous studies on the latter, the iconic function of prosody, have mostly analyzed novel words and nonlinguistic vocalizations. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study has examined the iconic potential of the prosodic features of existing Japanese imitative words known as ideophones. In Experiment 1, female Japanese speakers pro…
Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
Phonotactic restrictions do not usually hold uniformly across the entire lexicon of a particular language, and thus the lexicon of a natural language is often assumed to consist of different sub-lexicons. A question that arises is how specific these sub-lexicons can be. A classic, conservative approach is to posit only broad distinctions, such as the distinction between native words versus borrowed words. An alternative approach is to posit more …
Rendaku is not blocked by two nasal consonants: A reply to Kim (2022)
Rendaku is a morphophonological process in Japanese, in which the first consonant of the second element of compounds becomes voiced (e.g. /ao-sora/ → [ao-zora] ‘blue sky’). In a recent paper, Kim (2022) argues that the presence of two nasals—but not one nasal— in the second element reduces the probability of Rendaku application (e.g. /umi-kamome/ → [umi-kamome], *[umi-gamome] ‘seagull’). This claim has an important consequence for grammatical the…
Diana Archangeli & Douglas Pulleyblank (2022). Emergent Phonology. Berlin: Language Science Press. Pp. vi+193
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Variation, gender and perception: The social meaning of Japanese linguistic variables
The social categories that characterize a speaker frequently correlate with the use of specific linguistic variables. Research suggests that such correlations are sometimes recognized as socially-indexed meanings. This study examines Japanese individuals’ attitudes toward variables that have been shown to correlate with the social category of gender in production. In particular, we contrast patterns of gendered variation that (i) have been prescr…
How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: An experimental study with nonce words
Sound symbolism, systematic and iconic relationships between sounds and meanings, is now a topic that is very actively explored by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. As a new research strategy to study the nature of sound symbolic connections across different languages, a number of scholars have started using Pokémon names, a research paradigm that is now dubbed “Pokémonastics.” The previous Pokémonastics studies have experimental…
Assessing the prosodic licensing of wh-in-situ in Japanese: A computational-experimental approach
What voiced obstruents symbolically represent in Japanese: Evidence from the Pokémon universe
Kawahara, Noto, and Kumagai (2018b) found that within the corpus of existing Pokémon names, the number of voiced obstruents in the characters’ names correlates positively with their weight, height, evolution levels and attack values. While later experimental studies to some extent confirmed the productivity of these sound symbolic relationships (e.g. Kawahara and Kumagai 2019a), they are limited, due to the fact that the visual images presented t…
The diachronic origins of Lyman's Law: Evidence from phonetics, dialectology and philology
Modern Japanese has a set of morphophonemic alternations known collectively as rendaku that involve initial consonants in second elements of compounds, as in /jama+dera/ ‘mountain temple’ (cf. /tera/ ‘temple’). An alternating element like /tera/ ~ /dera/ has an initial voiced obstruent in its rendaku allomorph and an initial voiceless obstruent in its non-rendaku allomorph. Lyman's Law blocks rendaku in a second element containing a medial voiced…
Testing MaxEnt with sound symbolism: A stripy wug-shaped curve in Japanese Pokémon names: Supplementary material
Testing MaxEnt with sound symbolism: A stripy wug-shaped curve in Japanese Pokémon names
An issue that is actively explored in the contemporary linguistics literature is how to account for probabilistic generalizations, for which there are currently various competing theories. To bear on this debate, Hayes (2021) proposes that we examine a grammatical framework in terms of its QUANTITATIVE SIGNATURE, typical probabilistic patterns that the framework is predicted to generate. In this research report, I zoom in on the quantitative sign…
How to express evolution in English Pokémon names
This article contributes to the studies of sound symbolism, systematic relationships between sounds and meanings. Specifically, we build on a series of studies conducted within a research paradigm called “Pokémonastics,” which uses the Pokémon universe to explore sound symbolic patterns. Inspired by a study of existing English Pokémon names, two experiments were conducted in which English speakers were provided with pairs of pre-evolution and pos…
Japanese Perceptual Epenthesis is Modulated by Transitional Probability
Perceptual epenthesis is the perception of illusory vowels in consonantal sequences that violate native phonotactics. The consensus has been that each language has a single, predictable candidate for perceptual epenthesis, that vowel which is most minimal (i.e., shortest and/or quietest). However, recent studies have shown that alternate epenthetic vowels can be perceived when the perceptual epenthesis of the minimal vowel would violate native co…
Do Sibilants Fly? Evidence from a Sound Symbolic Pattern in Pokémon Names
Ancient writers, including Socrates and the Upanishads, argued that sibilants are associated with the notions of wind, air and sky. From modern perspectives, these statements can be understood as an assertion about sound symbolism, i.e., systematic connections between sounds and meanings. Inspired by these writers, this article reports on an experiment that tests a sound symbolic value of sibilants. The experiment is a case study situated within …
A wug-shaped curve in sound symbolism: The case of Japanese Pokémon names
An experiment showed that Japanese speakers’ judgement of Pokémons’ evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls ‘wug-shaped curves’, a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEn…
Gotta Name'em All: An Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese
Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology
A received wisdom in modern linguistic theories is that the relationships between sounds and meanings are generally arbitrary. However, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that in some cases sounds and meanings have systematic relationships-patterns known as "sound symbolism." Yet most of these studies are conducted by psychologists, cognitive scientists, or cognitive linguists, and currently, only a few theoretical phonologists pay se…
Accounting for the stochastic nature of sound symbolism using Maximum Entropy model
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…
Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese
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 langua…
Predictability and phonology: Past, present and future
Many papers in this special issue grew out of the talks given at the Symposium “The role of predictability in shaping human language sound patterns,” held at Western Sydney University (Dec. 10–11, 2016). Some papers were submitted in response to an open call; others were invited contributions. This introduction aims to contextualize the papers in the special issue within a broader theoretical context, focusing on what it means for phonological th…
Truncation in message-oriented phonology: A case study using Korean vocative truncation
This paper analyzes the vocative truncation pattern in Korean from the viewpoint of Message-Oriented Phonology (MOP), which capitalizes on the idea that sound patterns are governed by a principle that makes message transfer effective. In the traditional naming pattern, Korean first names consist of a generation marker and a unique portion, and the order between these two elements alternates between generations. To derive vocative forms, the gener…
A Faithfulness Ranking Projected from a Perceptibility Scale: The Case of [+ Voice] in Japanese
Within the framework of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004), Steriade (2001a,b) proposes the P-map hypothesis, whose fundamental tenet is that the rankings of faithfulness constraints are grounded in perceptual-similarity rankings. This article provides empirical support for this hypothesis. In Japanese loanword phonology, a voiced geminate, but not a singleton, devoices to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent within a single stem. B…
Frequency biases in phonological variation
Contextual effects on the perception of duration
The lingual articulation of devoiced /u/ in Tokyo Japanese
Japanese loanword devoicing revisited: A rating study
Emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words: A Wug-Test With Auditory Stimuli
The role of psychoacoustic similarity in Japanese puns: A corpus study
A growing body of recent work on the phonetics–phonology interface argues that many phonological patterns refer to psychoacoustic similarity – perceived similarity between sounds based on detailed acoustic information. In particular, two corresponding elements in phonology (e.g. inputs and outputs) are required to be as psychoacoustically similar as possible (Steriade 2001a, b, 2003; Fleischhacker 2005; Kawahara 2006; Zuraw 2007). Using a corpus …
Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology
A received wisdom in modern linguistic theories is that the relationships between sounds and meanings are generally arbitrary. However, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that in some cases sounds and meanings have systematic relationships-patterns known as "sound symbolism." Yet most of these studies are conducted by psychologists, cognitive scientists, or cognitive linguists, and currently, only a few theoretical phonologists pay se…
Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese
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 langua…
The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
Lyman's Law is active in loanwords and nonce words: Evidence from naturalness judgment studies
Japanese Perceptual Epenthesis is Modulated by Transitional Probability
Perceptual epenthesis is the perception of illusory vowels in consonantal sequences that violate native phonotactics. The consensus has been that each language has a single, predictable candidate for perceptual epenthesis, that vowel which is most minimal (i.e., shortest and/or quietest). However, recent studies have shown that alternate epenthetic vowels can be perceived when the perceptual epenthesis of the minimal vowel would violate native co…
Durational properties of emphatically lengthened consonants in Japanese
Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means 'frame' and [katta] with a long [tt] means 'bought'. This sort of contrast is usually limited to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse languages. The other use of phonetic duration is to express pragmatic emphasis. Spea…
Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects
In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g. /beddo / → [betto] ‘bed’). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) an…
The productivity of a root-initial accenting suffix, [-zu]: Judgement studies
Variation, gender and perception: The social meaning of Japanese linguistic variables
The social categories that characterize a speaker frequently correlate with the use of specific linguistic variables. Research suggests that such correlations are sometimes recognized as socially-indexed meanings. This study examines Japanese individuals’ attitudes toward variables that have been shown to correlate with the social category of gender in production. In particular, we contrast patterns of gendered variation that (i) have been prescr…
Gotta Name'em All: An Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese
Identity Avoidance and Lyman's Law
A corpus-based study of geminate devoicing in Japanese: Linguistic Factors
Auditory Contrast versus Compensation for Coarticulation: Data from Japanese and English Listeners
English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as “t” after [ʃ] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [ʃk, ʃt, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization and vowel devoicing from /sik, sit, suk, sut/, and acoustic vestiges of the devoiced vowels remain in the fricativ…
On the existence of root-initial-accenting suffixes: An elicitation study of Japanese [-zu]
Most known cases of affix controlled accentuation patterns involve local accent assignment: prefixes assign root-initial accents whereas suffixes assign root-final accents. In this article we document the nonlocal accentuation behavior of [-zu], a recently emerged suffix in Japanese which an elicitation study reveals to be productively root-initial-accenting. We present a phonological analysis of the [-zu] data, showing that standard theories of …
Mimetic gemination in Japanese: A challenge for Evolutionary Phonology
1. Introduction Blevins's Evolutionary Phonology attempts to derive most if not all synchronic phonological patterns from diachronic changes: “[R]ecurrent synchronic sound patterns are a direct reflection of their diachronic origins, and, more specifically ... regular phonetically based sound change is the common source of recurrent sound patterns. Evolutionary Phonology ... investigates this hypothesis and explores its consequences for phonologi…
A Faithfulness Ranking Projected from a Perceptibility Scale: The Case of [+ Voice] in Japanese
Within the framework of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004), Steriade (2001a,b) proposes the P-map hypothesis, whose fundamental tenet is that the rankings of faithfulness constraints are grounded in perceptual-similarity rankings. This article provides empirical support for this hypothesis. In Japanese loanword phonology, a voiced geminate, but not a singleton, devoices to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent within a single stem. B…
Half rhymes in Japanese rap lyrics and knowledge of similarity
Phonetic naturalness and unnaturalness in Japanese loanword phonology
The role of psychoacoustic similarity in Japanese puns: A corpus study
A growing body of recent work on the phonetics–phonology interface argues that many phonological patterns refer to psychoacoustic similarity – perceived similarity between sounds based on detailed acoustic information. In particular, two corresponding elements in phonology (e.g. inputs and outputs) are required to be as psychoacoustically similar as possible (Steriade 2001a, b, 2003; Fleischhacker 2005; Kawahara 2006; Zuraw 2007). Using a corpus …
Contextual effects on the perception of duration
A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain s…
On the existence of root-initial-accenting suffixes: An elicitation study of Japanese [-zu]
Most known cases of affix controlled accentuation patterns involve local accent assignment: prefixes assign root-initial accents whereas suffixes assign root-final accents. In this article we document the nonlocal accentuation behavior of [-zu], a recently emerged suffix in Japanese which an elicitation study reveals to be productively root-initial-accenting. We present a phonological analysis of the [-zu] data, showing that standard theories of …
Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing
Japanese loanword devoicing revisited: A rating study
Auditory Contrast versus Compensation for Coarticulation: Data from Japanese and English Listeners
English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as “t” after [ʃ] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [ʃk, ʃt, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization and vowel devoicing from /sik, sit, suk, sut/, and acoustic vestiges of the devoiced vowels remain in the fricativ…
Laurence Labrune (2012). The phonology of Japanese. (The Phonology of the World's Languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiv + 296
The productivity of a root-initial accenting suffix, [-zu]: Judgement studies
Lyman's Law is active in loanwords and nonce words: Evidence from naturalness judgment studies
Frequency biases in phonological variation
A corpus-based study of geminate devoicing in Japanese: Linguistic Factors
Emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words: A Wug-Test With Auditory Stimuli
Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects
In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g. /beddo / → [betto] ‘bed’). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) an…
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
Nasal place assimilation and the perceptibility of place contrasts
Typological studies of place assimilation show that nasal consonants are more likely to assimilate in place than oral stops (Cho, 1990; Jun, 1995, 2004; Mohanan, 1993). Jun (1995, 2004) argues that this typological asymmetry derives from a difference in the perceptibility of the place contrasts in nasal consonants and in oral stops. Since the place contrasts in nasals are perceptually weaker than the place contrasts in oral stops, speakers are mo…
Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language
In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they – like adults – modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than…
Identity Avoidance and Rendaku
One important observation that is made in the past phonological research is that constraints on output structures can both block and trigger phonological processes (i.e., conspiracy: Kisseberth 1970). This paper reports an experiment which shows that an Identity Avoidance constraint (a.k.a. the OCP) both blocks and triggers one phonological process in the same language, namely rendaku in Japanese. Our wug- experiment shows that rendaku is more li…
Identity Avoidance and Lyman's Law
The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions
Durational properties of emphatically lengthened consonants in Japanese
Languages can make use of phonetic duration to signal two kinds of meanings. The first is a lexical, phonological contrast. For example, in Japanese [kata] with a short [t] means 'frame' and [katta] with a long [tt] means 'bought'. This sort of contrast is usually limited to a binary distinction, and its phonetic properties have been well studied for many diverse languages. The other use of phonetic duration is to express pragmatic emphasis. Spea…
Linguistics (54 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (52 works) · Philosophy (40 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (38 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Computer Science (36 works) · Phonology (32 works) · Mathematics (22 works) · Artificial Intelligence (18 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (17 works)