The processing of word prosody in Japanese

要旨

ABSTRACT- The prosodic structure of Japanese polysyllabic words is defined by patterns of high and low pitch accents. The present study investigated whether the accent level of a single syllable extracted from its word context can be reliably identified by listeners. 96 tokens of the same CV sequence, extracted from the utterances of 32 words by three speakers, were presented to 24 listeners; their correct identification rates were high. Scores were higher for word-initial than for word-final syllables, and acoustic correlates of accent level were stronger in word-initial syllables, which is consistent with a role for pitch accent information in lexical access in Japanese.

主題