Delayed pitch fall in Japanese: Perceptual experiment

要旨

Hasegawa and Hata [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 83, S29 (1988)] investigated the delayed pitch fall phenomenon in Tokyo dialect Japanese in production data and examined the relationships of perceived accent to the peak location and the steepness of the falling contour. Pitch fall, the only acoustic correlate of the accent in Japanese, sometimes occurred on the syllable following the accented syllable. A delayed pitch fall tends to be steeper the later it occurs. The present paper examines delayed pitch fall from a perceptual point of view. Three-syllable synthetic stimuli /ma ma ma/ were prepared with the F0 peak in different locations and different falling slopes. These stimuli were presented to native Japanese subjects in order to determine whether perception and production are correlated in this phenomenon, i.e., whether a change in the location of the peak and the degree of F0 fall in the second /ma/ causes the accent to be perceived on the first syllable. Implications for speech recognition will be discussed.

主題