Analysis of spontaneous Japanese in a multi-language telephone-speech corpus

An analysis of pronunciation variations of Japanese component of the Oregon Graduate Institute Multi-Language Telephone Speech (OGI-TS) Corpus is presented. These variations include reduction or deletion, and frequencies of occurrence and duration of both vowels and consonants in corpus. This corpus contains 90 calls and each call was uttered by a unique adult speaker. Filled pauses, hesitations and other instances of interruption in the speech stream were also transcribed. The non-high vowel devoicing is common in this corpus than would be anticipated on the basis of the published literature. In Japanese, the main difference between careful and spontaneous speech is in the proportion of vowel devoicing and deletion. The variations in pronunciation of consonants in Japanese includes glottal fricative, nasalization of vowels before nasals, and other forms of consonant reduction.