Introduction 5linguistic rhythmic differences, an important contribution to the area in gen-
eral since nonsegmental studies have been rare. Her conclusions are that that
the stress-timed background languages of the immigrants have had a small
but noticeable inÀ uence on their French, not removing it from the group of
generally syllable-timed European Romance languages but providing it with
vowel reduction and consonant clustering characteristics related to rate of
articulation.
Chapter 5 is another contribution to nonsegmental characteristics and is
an interesting example of cross-linguistic research in the sociophonetic ¿ eld.
Yaeger-Dror, Takano, Granadillo, and Hall-Lew seek to uncover the prosodic
contours associated with NEG in English, Japanese, and Spanish, using pitch,
duration, and amplitude in all three languages to determine lexical (syllable)
prominence. The authors employ a considerable array of social and linguistic
factors to study (treated in a VARBRUL analysis) the choice of prominence
for NEG. They conclude that news announcing rather than casual interac-
tions, positions other than end-or-sentence for NEG, full rather than clitic
morphology of NEG itself, supportive (rather than informative or remedial)
footing, and women are factors that promote prominence in NEG, along with
interesting detail about region and other factors.
Chapter 6 is the ¿ rst of two studies included in this book on Japanese
vowel devoicing, a feature long thought to have only regional and/or standard
language signi¿ cance on the social side and relatively categorical environ-
mental conditioning on the linguistic. Imai shows, however, interesting social
variation within Tokyo Japanese, particularly in the interaction between age
and sex, in which young men (but not middle-aged and older ones) are con-
siderably more frequent devoicers. This study, like many of the others in this
book, also makes a straightforward contribution to a much more detailed
understanding of linguistic environmental inÀ uences on phonetic variables,
here ones that promote and demote devoicing in a considerably more ¿ ne-
tuned way than was previously thought, although Hibiya (1999: 119) hints at
greater variability and change for this feature in Tokyo.
Part II: Perception
The ¿ rst chapter in the section on perception continues to look at the vari-
able of Japanese vowel devoicing. Popular belief suggests that native speakers
think devoicing of /i/ and /u/ between voiceless consonants and at the ends of
words is standard Kanto area (Tokyo) Japanese and that speakers from other
regions, particularly the Kansai area (Osaka) do not devoice or do not devoice