Pitch declination in Japanese : an instrumental study
Date
1983
Authors
Gallaiford, Neil
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Pitch declination involves a progressive lowering of pitch and a narrowing of pitch range over the length of utterance in speech. Because this pattern is attested in a great number of diverse languages, it has been proposed as a universal feature of intonation. The present study was undertaken to discover if pitch declination is a feature of the intonation of Japanese.
Previous, non-acoustic, studies of Japanese have suggested that pitch does tend to decline in longer phrases in the language. Using a method similar to that employed by Sorensen and Cooper (1980, 1981) in their work on pitch declination in English, an acoustic analysis of neutral declarative sentences spoken by out. After extracting the native speakers was carried fundamental frequency (F0) contours of the utterances, the F0 peaks associated with the lexical items in each sentence were identified and compared. It was found that the fundamental frequency of these peaks tends to decrease over the length of the sentence. Japanese and English are similar . in this respect. The tendency of pitch to decline over the course of the shorter sentences in the data was strong; longer sentences tended to contain a pitch rise somewhere within them. On either side of the rise, pitch declined from peak to peak. This suggests that the domain of pitch declination is shorter in Japanese than it is in English as described by Sorensen and Cooper. Longer sentences are broken up into two (or more) 'intonation phrases' each of which is characterized by declining pitch. These intonation phrases do not seem to bear any necessary relationship to the syntactic structure of the sentences. The acoustic-phonetic data presented here provide a better basis for the description of the behaviour of pitch in Japanese utterances than do the auditory analyses on which previous studies have been based.