Intonational structure as a word-boundary cue in tokyo japanese

Natasha Warner, Takashi Otake, Takayuki Arai

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an accentual phrase (APR) would be as a potential word-boundary cue for Japanese listeners. A corpus study shows that it should allow listeners to locate approximately 40-60% of word onsets, while causing less than 1% false positives. We then present a word-spotting study which shows that Japanese listeners can, indeed, use accentual phrase boundary cues during segmentation. This work shows that the prosodic patterns that have been found in the production of Japanese also impact listeners' processing.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)107-131
Number of pages25
JournalLanguage and speech
Volume53
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2010

Keywords

  • Accentual phrase
  • Boundary
  • Intonation
  • Pitch accent
  • Segmentation
  • Word

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Speech and Hearing

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