Japanese pitch accent revisited: Quantifying its acoustic properties

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26770148
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Keio University
• Principal Investigator: SUGIYAMA Yukiko 慶應義塾大学, 理工学部(日吉), 准教授 (70525112)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: アクセント / 日本語 / 劣化雑音音声 / 音声知覚

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research aimed to examine and quantify acoustic cues to pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese. While past studies have shown that Japanese pitch accent is primarily realized by F0 contours, less is known about its secondary cues, including their existence. In the present study, noise-vocoded speech which contained no F0 or its harmonics was created and presented to native speakers of Tokyo Japanese. The results show that Japanese listeners were able to identify minimal pairs that contrast only in the presence or absence (e.g. haNA ‘flower’ and hana ‘nose’; the syllable indicated in upper case represents it is accented) at a rate that exceeded chance level. This suggests some acoustic signals that co-vary with pitch accent were present in the stimuli, allowing listeners to used them to distinguish the two types of words. An acoustic analyses of the　stimuli is currently in progress to identify the cues that listeners used.

Free Research Field

音声学