The effect of fo fall, downstep, and secondary cues in perceiving Japanese lexical accent.

Abstract

Lexical pitch accent in Japanese is primarily realized as a steep fall in fo 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 fo 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 fo 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.