Category Structure and Function of Pitch Accent in Tokyo Japanese Mafuyu Kitahara

130 Pages·2001·1.65 MB·English

Category Structure and Function of Pitch Accent in
Tokyo Japanese
Mafuyu Kitahara
Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of Linguistics
and the Cognitive Science Program
Indiana University
May 26, 2001
Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Dr. Kenneth de Jong
(Principal Adviser)
Dr. Robert F. Port
Dr. Stuart Davis
Bloomington, Indiana
March, 2001. Dr. David B. Pisoni
ii
(cid:176)c Copyright 2001
Mafuyu Kitahara
All rights reserved.
iii
To my parents with gratitude and admiration.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my committee members: Ken de Jong, Bob
Port, Stuart Davis, and David Pisoni. Ken, as the chair, guided me throughout the long
and hilly process of thesis-writing across the ocean. I, from Japan, just had to dump a
file to the very remote printer in the lab and Ken always gave me precise, practical, and
insightful comments promptly. Seminars, courses, and a teaching-assistant experience with
Ken have also been quite influential to me. In fact, this thesis is a development of the
term paper for the advanced phonetics class I took from him in the very first semester at
IU. Thoughts about functional load and prosody came to my mind first in his seminar on
feature and contrast. I truly thank him for what he provided to me.
Bob also gave me a tremendous amount of support both intellectually and emotionally.
With his assistance, I became a member of the CRANIUM lab in the Computer Science
Department from which I learned most of the techniques for experiments, statistics, graph-
ics, and LATEX-ing. Bob’s enthusiasm and inspirations about the dynamic and continuous
natureofspeechprovidedmeaseedforanideatotakedevoicingasasourceofperturbation.
Stuart took care of me so much on the “Day One” at IU when I visited IU and several
other universities. His warm support and kind assistance was one of the most convincing
reasons I decided to enter IU. His courses on the latest development of Optimality Theory
have helped me to think typologically and formally.
Dave’s seminar on speech perception spoken word recognition literary opened my eyes
to the vast field of cognitive psychology. By his famous thick reading packets with 4 writ-
ing assignments, I was really sleep deprived in that semester! His depth and breadth of
knowledge in every corner of the history of speech sciences were quite beneficial to me.
IlearnedalotaboutMatlabandDSPtechniquesfromDianeKewley-Port,statisticsand
scientific attitude from John Kruschke, and what cognitive science is from Rob Goldstone.
Though not represented in my committee, their input formed the basis for this project. I
also thank other faculty in various departments at IU. Steven Franks, Mike Gasser, Yasuko
Ito-Watt, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, Paul Newman, Sam Obeng, and Natsuko Tsujimura have all
given me helpful advice and warm support in the five years of my stay at IU.
I also would like to thank the administrative and systems staff: Ann Baker and Marilyn
Estep in Linguistics, Karen Loffland in Cognitive Science, and Bruce Shei in Computer
Science. They have helped me to go over bureaucratic jobs, to get financial assistance, and
to solve technical problems.
All experiments and analyses which constitute the body of this thesis have been done
at the NTT Communication Science Labs in Japan. Without their financial support and
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facilities, this thesis could not have been completed. I especially thank Shigeaki Amano for
his generous support in all aspects of research life in Japan. I also thank Tadahisa Kondo,
Kenichi Sakakibara, Reiko Mazuka, and Naoko Kudo for their comments, assistance, and
entertainment.
Before coming to IU, I spent my undergraduate and graduate school life at Kyoto Uni-
versity in Japan. I thank Masatake Dantsuji, Haruo Kubozono, Michinao Matsui, Miyoko
Sugito, Yukinori Takubo, Koichi Tateishi, Masaaki Yamanashi, and Kazuhiko Yoshida for
their helpful advice and intellectual support in the early days of my academic carrier in
Kyoto and their continuous support afterwards.
Special thanks to Hideki Kawahara for allowing me to use the STRAIGHT program
for F resynthesis. I thank Mary Beckman who first taught me the laboratory phonology
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approach in her course at the LSA institute and have given me a lot of insights about the
tonal structure of Japanese. Shosuke Haraguchi, Bruce Hayes, Junko Itˆo, Kikuo Maekawa,
and Armin Mester have provided me helpful comments and advice at various stages in the
development of this thesis.
My lab-mates (or former lab members) in the CRANIUM have provided all kinds of
support. Keiichi Tajima, Fred Cummins, Bushra Zawaydeh, Doug Eck, Dave Wilson, Deb-
bie Burleson, Dave Collins, Adam Leary have all been very stimulating and helpful. Special
thanks go to Keiichi Tajima for not only being a lab-mate but also being a room-mate, a
friend, a mentor, an S-PLUS advisor, a TEX-nician, a poker-teacher, a cooking assistant, a
parallel parking guide and a lot more...
An on-line phonology discussion group in Japan has been a source of qualified and
valuable information both in Kyoto and in Bloomington. I especially thank Takeru Honma,
Hideki Zanma, Teruo Yokotani, and Masahiko Komatsu for their lively and stimulating
discussions. My fellow students in Bloomington, Kyoto, and other places have also been
quite supportive. Karen Baertsch, Masa Deguchi, Nicole Evans, Brian Gygi, Yasuo Iwai,
Laura Knudsen, Koh Kuroda, Laura McGarrity, Kyoko Nagao, Kwang Chul Park, Mark
Pennington, Liz Peterson, Hisami Suzuki, Jeniffer Venditti, Kiyoko Yoneyama, Hanako
Yoshida, Natsuya Yoshida, and Yuko Yoshida have provided me various sorts of comments,
encouragement, and friendship.
Special thanks are due to my parents, Itoko and Ryuji Kitahara, for their forbearance
frommyslipperyandlengthystudent-life. Backinhighschooldays,theyignitedmyinterest
in human intelligence, which eventually lead me to study linguistics.
Finally, my wife and a research partner, Haruka Fukazawa has helped and encouraged
me throughout the entire course of the writing of this thesis. She has accompanied me to
many conferences, workshops, and my defense, helping me to prepare for overheads and
drafts even when she had a heavy teaching load and deadlines for her own research. When
I broke my leg and got hospitalized, she showed up the next morning flying over hundreds
of miles. When I was stressed out writing an argument that seemed to go nowhere, she
cheered me up and got my self-confidence back. It is truly difficult to imagine finishing this
thesis without her.
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Abstract
ThisthesisinvestigatesperceptualcategoriesofcontrastivepitchaccentsinTokyoJapanese.
Pitch movement of the accent, the preceding context of the accent, the tonal structure in
an accentual phrase, and the vowel devoicing in and after the accented mora have been
investigated independently and unsystematically in the previous studies. The present study
integrates all these factors to reveal the category structure of all opposition types in 2-mora
words. There are three 2-way and one 3-way oppositions possible in 2-mora words. Two
of them involve accent-presence detection (accented or unaccented), and others involve
accent-location detection (where the accent is).
Threeexperimentsweredesignedbasedonanexplicitphonologicalmodeloftonalstruc-
ture. The stimuli were created by STRAIGHT: a high-quality F resynthesis method. Ex-
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periment 1 showed that the steepness of the falling pitch movement of the accent does not
interact with the tone alignment position in 2-way oppositions. Experiment 2 showed that
the preceding context of the accent does not influence the prominence of the pitch accent in
2-way oppositions. Thus, it is argued that the High-tone alignment determines the accent
location and the amount of the pitch drop determines the accent presence. Experiment
3 showed that this view basically holds in a 3-way opposition. An important difference
between Experiments 2 and 3 is that the category boundary for accent-presence detection
shifts more than that for accent-location detection.
The voicing condition was varied across fully voiced, partially devoiced, and fully de-
voiced moras in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 covered the latter two conditions.
Overall, it was found that the cessation of the pitch contour not only by a devoiced vowel
but also by a voiceless consonant affects the perception of pitch accents.
This study also investigates how to quantify the distinctive function of pitch accent and
how to develop a formally and experimentally plausible theory of functional load. Previ-
ous formalizations of functional load have been too focussed on segmental distinctions and
cannot handle privative oppositions seen in pitch accents in Japanese. Two quantitative
measures were proposed for the distinctive function of accent: one is called Lexical Distinc-
tiveness (LD)which is the ratio of opposing and non-opposing relations in homophones, the
other is called Familiarity Bias (FB) which is the sum of word familiarity differences across
opposed homophones. An analysis of a large-scale database was conducted to derive the
LD and FB values for the stimulus words used in Experiment 2. A post-hoc analysis was
conductedforthecategorizationresultstofindthat, inthedevoicedcondition, theresponse
is biased to the word with a lower LD value in an accentual minimal pair.
The database analysis also revealed that the opposition of accent-location is dominant
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in 2-mora words while that of accent-presence is dominant in 3- and 4-mora words. Taken
together with the observation about the shift of category boundaries, it is suggested accent-
location detection is functionally more fundamental than accent-presence detection only in
2-mora words.
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Contents
Acknowledgments v
Abstract vii
1 Introduction and background 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Pitch accent system in Tokyo Japanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2.1 Phonological/descriptive studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2.2 Statistical survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2.3 Experimental studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.4 Phonology in Pierrehumbert & Beckman’s model . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.5 Vowel devoicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.3 Functionalism in phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3.1 Classic functionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3.2 Functional load . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3.3 Type/token frequency and word familiarity . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.4 Functions of pitch accent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5 Lexical access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2 Overview of perception experiments 16
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2 Previous experimental studies on accent perception . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.1 Sugito (1982) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2.2 Hasegawa & Hata (1992) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2.3 Matsui (1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.3 Intonation synthesis in Pierrehumbert & Beckman’s model . . . . . . . 21
2.3.1 Tone sequencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3.2 Declination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3.3 Convolution and jitter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.4 Resynthesis procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.5 Stimulus preparation and presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3 Categorization in a 2-way distinction 31
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
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3.2 Experiment 1: Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.3 Experiment 1: Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.3.1 Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.3.2 Stimulus design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.3.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.4 Experiment 1: Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.4.1 Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.4.2 Effect of scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.4.3 Effect of slope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.4.4 Effect of devoicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3.5 Experiment 1: Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.6 Experiment 2: Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.7 Experiment 2: Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.7.1 Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.7.2 Stimulus design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.7.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.8 Experiment 2: Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.8.1 Effect of devoicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.8.2 Effect of phrasal H scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.9 Experiment 2: Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4 Categorization in a 3-way distinction 64
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.2 Purpose and predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.3 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.3.1 Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.3.2 Stimulus design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.3.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.4 Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.4.1 Distribution of 3 accentual categories in voiced and devoiced condi-
tions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.4.2 Comparison with the results in a 2-way distinction . . . . . . 74
4.4.3 Effect of phrasal H scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
5 Functions of pitch accent: a database analysis 82
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.2 Database analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.2.1 Structure of the database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.2.2 Homophones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.2.3 Distribution of accent locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.2.4 Distribution of oppositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.3 Formalization of oppositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
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