Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan

In this paper, I will discuss on the four-pattern accent system found in Hadong-gun, Namhaegun and Sacheon-si in the west Gyeongsang province of Korea, and report on data obtained during field work there. In the four-pattern accent system proposed in this paper, only four oppositions exist irrespective of the length of the accentual units. In this paper, I will take Hadong dialect as a representative, and discuss phenomena such as the accents of compound words, the correspondence with the (n+1)-way opposition for n-syllable words seen in Masan dialect accent system, the accents of verbs and adjectives, and others which have not yet considered.

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This paper describes the accent system of the Miryang dialect, located in eastern Gyeong-sangnamdo in Korea. This dialect exhibits an (n+2)-way opposition for monosyllabic and bisyllabic nouns, and a (2n-1)-way opposition for nouns longer than that. It has the prosodic properties of accent kernel and word-tone. Word-tone is a prosodic property which contrasts in 'shape'. This 'shape' is contrastive in terms of its 'location' (where the pitch falls).

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The level of phonetic realization of lexical accent (reduced level, which, in the case of words with an accent kernel, is exhibited by a low F0 value, or full level) is one of the major determinants of sentence intonation in Tokyo Japanese. Three experiments were conducted to provide evidence to support the author's previous claim that the reduction of accent level is triggered by semantically restrictive modification, and not by syntax. In Experiment 1, F0 values of the first two constituents of [[A[BC]]D] and [A[[BC]D]] were compared. The results indicated the irrelevance of overall syntactic branching structure for the accent level. In Experiments 2 and 3, peak F0 values of nouns with an accent kernel in semantically restrictive and non-restrictive conditions were investigated acoustically and perceptually. The results supported the prediction: nouns have lower F0 values when they are semantically restricted by the directly preceding modifier than when they are not.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate what factors affect perceived speaking rate, especially in the case of spontaneous speech. The approach employed in this study was not an experiment in a laboratory condition, but an extraction of the factors from a large scale corpus of spontaneous speech. The materials used were taken from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and its perceived speaking rate database. A subjective speaking rate score on a five step ordinal scale was given to every recording in CSJ. A speaking rate score was a given to each recording as a whole. A canonical discriminant analysis between the perceived speaking rate score and objective attributes extracted from the speech samples was carried out. The results show that the speech of the fastest group had a large number of moras per second, while on the other hand, the speech of the slowest group had a small number of pauses per second, but with a high pause ratio.

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