Perception of Japanese pitch accent: Examination of minimal accent pairs

Abstract

Perception of Japanese pitch accent was examined using 20 bimoraic/disyllabic minimal accent pairs. A minimal accent pair refers to a pair of words that is identical except for their accent types. For example, /hana/ ‘‘flower’’ and /hana/ ‘‘nose’’ have the same phonemic sequence and the pitch pattern of low‐high yet they differ in that ‘‘flower’’ has accent on the word‐final mora while ‘‘nose’’ has no accent (unaccented). A preceding production study that utilized the same 20 pairs of words found that the maximum F0 in the word‐final mora was reliably higher for the final‐accented words than the unaccented words and the F0 rise from the initial mora to the final mora was reliably larger for the final accented words than the unaccented ones when they were produced sentence‐medially followed by a particle. However, the two accent types did not show any reliable difference when they were produced by themselves in isolation. This perception study accesses if the properties found to be related to Japanese pitch accent in production are actually used by listeners when they identify accent types. The relation between the production and perception of Japanese pitch accent will be discussed.