Speaker: Mafuyu Kitahara
Date: Sept 19 (Monday)
Time: 5 pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: Alignment and scaling of pitch accent in Japanese
Infant-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech
Authors: Mafuyu Kitahara, Ken’ya Nishikawa, Yousuke Igarashi, and
Reiko Mazuka
Abstract:
The present study examined F0 contour in Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)
and Adult-Directed Speech (ADS). It has been pointed out that the
timing of F0 fall in Japanese sometimes occurs later than the
lexically accented syllable (Sugito, 1982). As reported earlier, the
amount of delay is larger in IDS than in ADS (Kitahara et al.,
2008). Their analysis was based solely on the highest point of F0,
however. The present study gives a more detailed analysis of the F0
contour of the whole accentual phrase by fitting a three-piece linear
regression (Cho, 2010) for the rising part and the falling part
separately.The acoustic data were taken from Riken Japanese Mother-Infant
Conversation Corpus (R-JMICC) and a list-reading corpus spoken by the
same group of mothers as R-JMICC. A preliminary analysis of the data
showed that the delayed-fall tokens tend to have a delayed-rise as
well. It was also found that the timing of the lower and the upper
elbows in the F0 contours have a systematic difference in IDS than in
ADS. Theoretical implications for autosegmental/metrical phonology
based on these results will be discussed.