The perception of Japanese pitch accent in “whispered” speech

Abstract

The perception of Japanese pitch accent was investigated using “whispered” speech in which the F0 was artificially removed. While the F0 is said to be the primary cue for pitch accent in Japanese, it is not certain whether acoustic correlates other than F0 exist. The results of previous production studies that examined vowel duration or devoicing as a correlate of pitch accent are not consistent. The present study attempts to find correlates of pitch accent from the other end, i.e., perception. A native speaker of Tokyo Japanese produced 14 disyllabic minimal pairs that differed only in the presence or absence of accent (e.g., /hana*/ “flower” when accented vs. /hana/ “nose” when unaccented) in a carrier sentence. The utterances were then edited by replacing the F0 by random noise, creating artificial “whispered” speech. Twenty-two native speakers of Tokyo Japanese identified the words they heard in two kinds of stimuli, the 14 minimal pairs as produced by the speaker and the whispered speech. The results suggest evidence of pitch accent in whispered speech. Implications of the results for the nature of Japanese pitch accent and the perception of accent will be discussed.