Abstract This study uses electropalatography to examine linguopalatal contact differences between Japanese geminate and singleton consonants of various lingual places and manners of articulation. The analysis of over 8,000 tokens of these consonants produced by five Japanese speakers in three sets of stimuli (varying by the word lexical status, contrastive focus, and position within an utterance) showed significantly stronger constrictions for geminates of all places and manners, except for alveolopalatal fricatives. The geminate-singleton differences were the largest for alveolar and alveolopalatal nasals, while being the smallest for alveolopalatal affricates and velar stops. Durational differences between geminates and singletons were quite robust and tended to positively correlate with linguopalatal contact differences for most geminate and singleton consonants. No clear contact or durational differences were observed across the datasets, suggesting that the realization of the contrast is affected minimally by lexical status and position in the utterance. The findings for Japanese geminates are further discussed in the context of articulatory studies of similar contrasts in other languages.
Alexei Kochetov (Wed,) studied this question.