Japanese vowel deletion occurs in words in citation form

Japanese vowels have allophonic reduced variants, including shortened, devoiced and deleted instances. This kind of linguistic behaviour is commonly associated with rapid or casual speech. However, the present report demonstrates that vowel deletion also occurs when Japanese speakers produce Japanese words in citation form, and not just in rapid or casual speech. We propose that deletion is more likely to occur in high-frequency lexical items, specifically in three regularly occurring suffixes