Abstract
In the Keihan-type accent system, which includes the Osaka dialect, the lexically specified pitch patterns (i.e., accents) of words are classified into the following two categories: high-beginning and low-beginning. During the pronunciation of isolated words, the low-beginning type has two characteristics, which are an initial low pitch, and a gradual pitch rise from the beginning to the accent nucleus. A number of researchers claim that the latter characteristic is more consistent and therefore more pertinent. This paper provides a detailed phonetic description of the behavior of this type of accent in various sentence conditions and argues the relative importance of the two characteristics. An acoustic analysis performed on 15 sets of sentences uttered by a total of 26 speakers revealed the following: An initial low pitch is a firm characteristic that does not easily disappear in a sentence context; A gradual rise may be acoustically flat or even slightly descendent in some conditions, but it is also a firm characteristic that distinguishes low-beginning words from high-beginning words. These results suggest that it is not legitimate to conclude that one of the two characteristics is more important.
