Published papers

Several studies in linguistics and related disciplines have been extensively exploring sound symbolism, systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Against this theoretical development, research on Pokémon names has shed new light on cross-linguistic similarities and differences in sound symbolic patterns, using similar experimental stimuli across different target languages. A recent experimental study has demonstrated that Brazilian Portuguese speakers sound-symbolically signal evolution when naming Pokémon characters: post-evolution Pokémon characters tend to receive longer names with more voiced obstruents, while preevolution characters tend to receive shorter names with fewer voiced obstruents. Other recent studies showed that in Japanese and English, sound symbolism can also signal differences in Pokémon type: evil-looking characters tend to be associated with voiced obstruents, while flyingtype characters tend to have names with sibilants. Integrating the insights offered by these two lines of previous studies, the current paper examines whether Brazilian Portuguese speakers are sensitive to these type-related sound symbolic associations. To improve upon previous studies, we used a free-naming task in order to give participants freedom to create new names. This experiment corroborated the associations between voiced obstruents and evil-type characters, but not the association between sibilants and flying-type characters. A follow-up experiment with a forced-choice paradigm, the same method used in earlier work, also failed to reveal systematic connections between sibilants and flying-type characters. These results indicate that this association may not be universal, contrary to the claim made in previous studies.

Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization depends on a specific talker's voice is still understudied. The present study investigated whether listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: Japanese singleton-geminate stop contrast (/k/-/kk/) and short-long vowel contrast (/e/-/ee/). The vowel contrast carries more reliable talker information than the stop contrast; hence, listeners' rate-based adjustments may be more talker-specific for vowels than for stops. The current results showed that context speaking rate impacted the perception of the target contrast across different talkers, and this influence was evident for both types of the contrasts tested. These results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target segment carried reliable talker information (i.e., vowel contrast) or not (i.e., stop contrast). The current results bear on the issue of how speaking rate information is processed with respect to talker information.

© The Author(s) 2017. 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 languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant–vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.