Perceptual cues to lexical accent contrasts in English and Japanese

Abstract

Earlier experiments have shown that Japanese and English differ in the extent to which they use duration and vowel amplitude patterns as acoustic correlates of lexical accent [M. E. Beckman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71, S23 (1982); J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 75, S41 (1984)]. A new experiment examines the relative salience of various acoustic correlates as perceptual cues in the two languages. Minimally contrasting test utterance pairs from the earlier production experiments were used to synthesize test stimuli with all possible combinations of acoustic patterns (e.g., the F0 and amplitude patterns of contráct combined with the duration and spectral quality patterns of cóntract). Japanese, Americans with speaking knowledge of Japanese, and monolingual Americans judged the accent patterns of these test stimuli. Results showed differences correlated both with the source language of the stimulus, and with the language background of the subject. For all three groups, F0 was the dominant cue to the accent patterns of the Japanese stimuli, scoring significantly higher than it did in the judgments of the English stress patterns by the same group. In judging the English stimuli, the monolingual American subjects relied on acoustic cues other than F0 to a greater extent than did the bilingual Americans, although both American groups used them to a greater extent than did the Japanese subjects, most of whose scores for amplitude, duration, and spectral quality patterns were at chance.