Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, 4-1-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa 223-8521, Japan.
Acoustics Research Centre, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2021 Oct;150(4):2865. doi: 10.1121/10.0006689.
Lexical pitch accent in Japanese is primarily realized as a steep fall in f from an accented syllable into the following one. In addition, when a phrase that contains an accented syllable is followed by another phrase, the following phrase undergoes downstep, a compression of the f range. Furthermore, while their acoustic identity is not yet clear, secondary cues to Japanese pitch accent are known to exist. The present study examined how speakers of Tokyo Japanese used acoustic information from these three sources in perceiving lexical pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese. Listeners heard stimuli in which the acoustic cues related to accent were independently manipulated and were asked to identify if a word presented sentence-medially was a final-accented word or its unaccented counterpart. Results found that listeners' judgments of words were most consistent with the presence or absence of downstep. That is, listeners identified that the preceding phrase contained an accented word when the following phrase was downstepped. Listeners also used the f fall to determine if the word in question was a final-accented word or an unaccented word. Secondary cues to pitch accent were most weakly related to listeners' identification of accent.
日语的词汇重音主要表现为重读音节的 f 从一个音高升高到下一个音高的陡峭下降。此外，当包含重读音节的短语后面跟着另一个短语时，下一个短语会经历音高下降，即 f 范围的压缩。此外，尽管日语重音的次要线索的声学特征尚不清楚，但已知它们的存在。本研究考察了东京日语使用者如何利用这三个来源的声学信息来感知东京日语中的词汇重音。听众听到了刺激，其中与重音相关的声学线索被独立地操纵，并被要求确定在句子中间呈现的单词是重读音节的单词还是非重读音节的对应词。结果发现，听众对单词的判断最符合音高下降的存在或缺失。也就是说，当下面的短语音高下降时，听众会识别出前面的短语包含重读音节的单词。听众也使用 f 下降来确定所讨论的单词是重读音节的单词还是非重读音节的单词。次要的重音线索与听众对重音的识别关系最不密切。
