Japanese pitch accent: examination of final-accented and unaccented minimal pairs

This paper presents partial results from ongoing research on the acoustic correlates of Japanese pitch accent. This research exploits bimoraic/disyllabic minimal pairs that are identical except for their accent types. While previous studies have consistently found a notable acoustic difference between final-accented and unaccented words in the following particle, it has been debated whether there is any difference within the words themselves. The current study used all 20 minimal pairs that have a relatively high familiarity rating in the computerized dictionary by Amano and Kondo (2000). Preliminary results from five talkers suggest that findings from previous research, which are based on a few pairs of words, hold for a larger set of words in general. That is, the absolute F0 maximum is higher and F0 difference between the first and second syllable is larger for final-accented words than unaccented words only when they are produced sentence-medially.