Perception of acoustic cues to Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent contrasts in native Japanese and naive English listeners.

This study examines how native language shapes the perception of a prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, a high-low pitch accent is a lexical property of a word, and the F0 fall after the peak associated with the accented syllable is the fundamental cue to accent perception. In English, pitch accents do not create lexically contrastive F0 patterns. A hypothesis that English listeners naive to Japanese use the F0 fall cue less than Japanese listeners was tested in two experiments. The alignment of F0 peak, the presence and magnitude of F0 fall were manipulated in a trisyllabic nonword to resynthesize Japanese 1st-syllable accented, 2nd-syllable accented, and unaccented patterns. In an AX-discrimination experiment, both listener groups showed sensitivity to the presence of F0 fall at every peak location. In a categorization experiment, the English group did not use the F0 fall cue in decisions about whether the 1st or the 2nd syllable sounded more prominent. The Japanese group relied on the F0 fall information, some listeners much heavily than others. These findings suggest that one's native language constrains how much attention the prosodic dimension of F0 change receives and that individual listeners may have qualitatively different perceptual strategies.