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Descriptions of Japanese phonology (such as
[Wikipedia's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Devoicing))
usually describe high vowels between voiceless consonants (or word-finally) as
"devoiced". For example, the pronunciation of ⟨圧⟩ 'pressure' and ⟨悲観⟩
'pessimism' are described as:

> /aꜜtu/ → [átsu̥]
>
> /hikaɴ/ → [çi̥kãɴ́]

But it often sounds to me like the supposedly devoiced vowel is actually
dropped, with the preceding consonant expanding to fill 1 mora's time.
Similarly, I have seen word-final devoiced vowels dropped in written
pronunciations, such as "/desu/ → [des]" rather than "→ [desu̥]". In this
analysis, the pronunciations would be

> /aꜜtu/ → [áts] or [áts̩] or [átsː]
>
> /hikaɴ/ → [ç̩kãɴ́] or [çːkãɴ́]

Which of these better describes the actual contemporary Japanese
pronunciation? (Further, does this vary by dialect or speech register?)

(Related to [What are the rules regarding "mute vowels" ("u" after "s" and "i"
after "sh")?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/what-are-the-
rules-regarding-mute-vowels-u-after-s-and-i-after-sh).)
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pronunciation phonology linguistics phonetics vowels
Actual phonetic realization of "devoiced" vowels
> such as "/desu/ → [des]" rather than "→ [desu̥]".

As far as I know, it really depends on who is talking… Some linguists I met
said that it _should_ be pronounced since there is no way to write "s-without-
a-vowel" in the language…
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I guess that it depends on dialects, but when vowels /i/ and /ɯ/ are
“devoiced” in the Tokyo dialect, these vowels are actually dropped and the
preceding consonant fills the mora. Moreover, if the vowel is /i/, the
consonant is palatalized.

[This blog article](http://ameblo.jp/nirenoya/entry-10596656979.html) (in
Japanese) gives a fairly detailed description of “devoiced vowels” in the
Tokyo dialect.
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I've got an old PDF folder full of papers on Japanese, and I managed to pull
up two which might be helpful. (I've been on the search for a full detailed
phonetic study of Japanese. Add a comment if you know of some other technical
resources!). The first, the open paper [Processing missing vowels: Allophonic
processing in Japanese (Ogasawara and Warner,
2009)](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2775/445b385a59e2e6f7784728bf0578db4fc6fc.pdf)
(from the journal Language and Cognitive Processes) and the second, which I
think needs to be purchased, Vowel devoicing and the perception of spoken
Japanese words (Cutler & Otake & McQueen, 2008). If you can take a look at
those papers, they have spectrogram of the voiced/voiceless sounds and they
are quite informative.

Ogasawara has a very informative diagram at the beginning of his paper which
displays an oscillogram and spectrogram of two phonetic variants of the non-
word /hokita/; one in which the speaker obeys the devoicing (reduction)
convention, and the other in which the speaker diligently avoids the devoicing
tendency. So, two phonetic forms [hokʲi̥ta] and [hokʲita]. The observation
made is that the reduced vowel has no periodic wave or frequency mass
resembling a formant, so that the vowel [i̥] appears to be virtually deleted.
What is found after the [kʲ] in [hokʲi̥ta] then is "frication noise following
the plosive burst of /k/, so that the vowel [i̥] consists of only low
amplitude palatalized voiceless noise."

The paper is free, so take a look two spectrograms corresponding to the
[-voiced] and [+voiced] forms at the bottom of the figure. The characteristic
voice bar which indicates frequency mass at low frequencies (characteristic of
phonation) are absent in the devoiced vowel. So, clearly there is some
veracity to the term "devoicing". For the [-voiced] vowel, I can't even see
any noise in the waveform, so it appears as if [kʲ] is just an extra prolonged
stop. Which seems in agreement with Ogasawara's opinion that "phonetically,
so-called devoiced vowels are often deleted (Vance, 1987, in press; Yuen,
2000), or a short, low-amplitude vowel may remain (Yuen, 2000)."

It seems that some some authors (Ogasawara, Vance) call it reduced instead of
devoiced to skirt the debate between devoicing vs. deletion. However, that is
not the end of the phonetic story for the unvoiced vowel, as it has a
coarticulatory impact:

> Japanese vowels, both unreduced and reduced, cause coarticulation in the
> preceding consonant, which allows identification of the /i/ or /u/ even if
> the vowel itself is deleted (Ostreicher & Sharf, 1976).

This suggests that the best way to recognize a devoiced vowel is to look for
consonants bearing the acoustic cue of this coarticulation as opposed to
measuring and comparing for "low amplitude palatalized voiceless noise".
Importantly, Ogasawara points out the simple reason why on phonological
grounds a vowel must be there in the underlying form:

> The reduced vowels are considered to be present at least in the underlying
> form, because they cause coarticulation, and because, if they were not
> present at all, this would leave consonant clusters (e.g., /kt/ in [k(i)ta]
> ‘North’) that are otherwise phonotactically impossible in Japanese.

And other interesting ideas/observations:

> Cutler et al. (in press) find that listeners do not restore reduced vowels
> at an early, automatic stage of processing. Furthermore, they find that the
> number of words in the lexicon containing a given string with a reduced
> vowel affects how likely listeners are to assume a reduced vowel is present.
> They conclude that Japanese listeners’ restoration of reduced vowels happens
> during lexical, rather than prelexical, processing.

> Reduced vowels are acoustically weak, which might make them harder to
> process. However, phonotactic knowledge (which indicates that a vowel must
> be present because of the consonant cluster) should facilitate the
> recognition even of reduced vowels. Moreover, language-specific knowledge of
> the allophonic alternation should facilitate recognition of reduced and
> unreduced vowels in their appropriate environments (e.g., [(i)] in [k(i)ta]
> ‘North’ and [i] in [itRigo] ‘strawberry’).

> Although devoicing is not obligatory, analyses of the Corpus of Spontaneous
> Japanese ͑Maekawa, 2003 show that it is highly probable ͑over 98% in some
> environments; Kondo, 2005; Maekawa and Kikuchi, 2005.

And on the perceptibility of the devoiced vowel, Cutler says:

> The effect of this devoicing is the creation of sequences of consonants not
> separated by the periodic articulation normally associated with vowels. In
> contrast, insertion of a vowel into a consonant cluster ͑e.g., fillum for
> film͒ makes recognition easier, in part because the consonants in the clus-
> ter indeed become easier to identify if separated.

So, this might not have been all the information you were looking for, but
beyond this you start to get into statistical analysis of signals and
techniques from experimental design, which I don't fully understand.
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