Mafuyu Kitahara (Yamaguchi University): Pitch accents in the region without pitch information


High vowels are often devoiced between voiceless consonants in
Japanese. Pitch accent in a devoiced mora has been a frequent topic of
discussion in the phonetics literature. However, the pitch necessary
to convey accentual information is absent not only in the devoiced
vowel but also in voiceless consonants.  The present paper focuses on
pitch accent perception in devoiced and partially devoiced mora, which
are compared to the case of fully voiced mora as the baseline
condition.  F0-resynthesized speech was used to investigate boundaries
among accent categories in 2-mora words.  The results show that the
more the pitch information is lost, the greater the categorical
boundary shifts. In other words, voiceless consonant alone affects the
pitch accent perception.  Devoiced vowel does so in a more extreme but
predictable fashion.