High vowels elision in Japanese

A perceptive approach

Abstract

The present study will focus on the perception by the native speakers of elided high vowels in Japanese and of deleted sounds in spontaneous speech. Study of mother tongues perception of the said phenomenon may serve as a capstone toward the acceptance of elided vowels in Japanese. It is a common belief among scholars that vowel elision may interfere with words comprehension, for the missing vowel would create a high rate of ambiguity, especially when dealing with minimal pairs. For this reason, the present study aims to demonstrate that words are easily understood despite vowel elision, through a perceptive test based on the recognition of 11 minimal pairs. Results revealed that vowel elision does not cause much trouble in the identification of the target words.