Quantity Comparison of Japanese and Finnish in Various Word Structures

摘要

The durational patterns of short and long vowels and consonants were investigated at the segmental and lexical level using variable syllable structures in Japanese and Finnish. The results showed that the Japanese segmental ratios between short and long in both vowels and consonants were longer than those of Finnish only when all segments were pooled. However, this was not necessarily true when observing their positions in different structures. Compared the lexical increase ratios based on the CVCV words, Japanese and Finnish showed regular patterns according to the word structures respectively. The Japanese patterns were very isochronical in any word structures, whereas the Finnish durational ratios stably decreased within the same moraic word structures with the same number of segments but different combinations of the same vowel and consonant. These results suggest that Japanese has a tendency to be more mora-counting than Finnish in temporal isochronity.