Osaka and Kagoshima Japanese citation tone acoustics: A linguistic-tonetic comparative study

Shunichi Ishihara
2012 Journal of the International Phonetic Association  
The pitch realisations of Osaka Japanese (OJ) and Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) accentual systems have been described in details, and analysed in various phonological frameworks. However, there is few descriptive research on the acoustic-phonetic realisation of the accentual systems of Japanese dialects, whereby the acoustic-phonetic realisation of a given pitch pattern is described and represented in the manner that allows a cross-dialect comparison. In this study, the f0 realisations of the LH,
more » ... LLH and LLLH pitch patterns -which appear both in OJ and KJ-will be acoustically-phonetically described by means of the z-score normalisation. Comparing these descriptions across these dialects, it will be demonstrated in this study that 1) OJ shows significantly lower f0 realisations than KJ at the initial low pitched syllable of these pitch patterns; 2) in KJ, these pitch patterns start around the average f0 of a speaker's f0 distribution and 3) the LLH and LLLH pitch patterns show a gradual f0 rise in OJ while they show a gradual f0 fall before a rise between the last two syllables in KJ. The implications that these observed differences will bring out for the surface tonal representation of KJ will also be explored.
doi:10.1017/s0025100311000478 fatcat:7zuh5dt6c5dz5ponstt53itzyu