A psycholinguistic perspective on Finnish and Japanese prosody: Perception, production and child acquisition of consonantal quantity distinctions

A series of psycholinguistic investigations was conducted on consonantal quantity distinctions, which are minimally contrasting with respect to the unit mora, in Finnish and Japanese.;First, a survey of phoneme frequencies revealed differences between Finnish and Japanese; long vowels and geminate consonants occur more frequently in Finnish than in Japanese. Second, a pair of experiments investigated adult production of short and long nasals (n vs. nn) in each language. Differences were found in production; the distinction between single and geminate nasals was larger in Finnish than in Japanese.;Third, a pair of experiments investigated the perceptual boundary between short and long nasals. Incremental changes in duration were perceived categorically in both languages; however, Finnish speakers seemed to have a narrower bandwidth for their categorical boundary than Japanese speakers.;Fourth, a pair of experiments investigated how Finnish and Japanese speakers perceive quantity contrasts in each other's language. Japanese speakers' productions of words containing /n/ and /nn/ were perceived as such by Finnish speakers, and Finnish speakers' productions of words containing /n/ and /nn/ were perceived as such by Japanese speakers.;Lastly, a pair of experiments investigated adults' and children's production and perception of short and long nasals in Finnish and Japanese. It was found that Finnish children are mastering the contrast earlier than Japanese children. Three theoretical points are discussed based on the findings from the survey and the experiments. First, 'unstretchability' of singletons is discussed; a much greater scatter of values was found for long segments compared to their short counterparts. I infer that more control over articulatory movements is required for short segments than for long segments.;Second, possible relationships between frequency of quantity contrasts and phonological processing are discussed; there may be a possibility that high frequency leads Finnish speakers to sharpen the boundary between these quantity contrasts in phonological processing.;Finally, based on the psycholinguistic data on quantity distinctions that are related to the rhythmic unit mora, issues in different kinds of timing and isochrony are reconsidered. I suggest that so-called stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed languages are patterns that emerge out of factors contributing to the prosody of language.