Emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words: A wug-test with auditory stimuli

Building on Nasu (1999), this paper reports an auditory judgment study of emphatic gemination in Japanese mimetic words. The study replicates Nasu's results that given C1VC2V-C3VC4V mimetic words, speakers by default target C2 for gemination, but that they can also geminate C3 if geminating C2 would result in a marked geminate. The experiment further reveals that Japanese speakers prefer stop geminates the most, fricative geminates less, and nasal geminates the least. This finding shows that speakers have differential preferences between the structures that exist in their language, supporting a growing body of experimental studies demonstrating that native speakers do not treat all attested structures alike.