Effect of focus and inter-accent-interval on lexical pitch accents in Japanese

Abstract

The effect of narrow focus and the size of inter-accent-interval (IAI) on the acoustic prominence of pitch accents in Japanese was investigated by measuring F0 maxima and variance. Subjects produced utterances containing two accented adjectives, with either 0, 1, or 2 syllables between the accents. Each sentence was produced with focus on the first, second, or none of the adjectives. The results show F0 maxima enhancement for the accented syllables under focus regardless of the word position, and attenuation in F0 movement peri-focally. Such effect resembles the pattern in Dutch [Rump and Collier, Language Speech 39, 1–17 (1996)] more than that in English [Eady and Cooper, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 402–415 (1986)]. The F0 variance during the first accent was significantly smaller in the presence of an accent clash, i.e., IAI=0. This pattern bears an interesting similarity to the stress-clash phenomenon [Cooper and Eady, J. Memory Language 25, 369–384 (1986)]. The focus effect was larger than the IAI effect, and they did not interact, i.e., the focus effect was not larger for further apart accents. This suggests that, in Japanese, the pragmatic function of pitch prevails over its lexical contrastive function.