Phonetic evidence for a phonological word of two to four moras in Japanese

This study aims to explore the lengthening of Japanese monomoraic nouns. The experiments have revealed that monomoraic nouns are lengthened by 40 to 50% and/or followed by pauses when not suffixed with monomoraic case markers. The phenomenon is specific to one-mora nouns since bimoraic nouns do not undergo a similar amount of lengthening even without particles. Moreover, monomoraic nouns preceded by adjective phrases of up to three moras have shown neither lengthening nor pause insertion equivalent to that of sentence-initial monomoraic nouns. This suggests that an adjective phrase plus a monomoraic noun forms a single phonological word. Consequently, all the results suggest that one or more lexical words form an independent phonological word of two to four moras in Japanese.