Speaker: Ryo Masuda
Title: Pitch perturbation in Japanese
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 22, 3pm (Note special date/time)
Location: 32-D831
Cross-linguistically, the fundamental frequency of vowels following voiced obstruents is lower than following voiceless stops, a phenomenon called pitch perturbation (House & Fairbanks 1953). It has been posited as a pathway to tonogenesis (Haudricourt 1954) and has been shown to be a cue to distinguish stop voicing contrasts for listeners (Whalen et al 1993). It is plausible, then, that pitch may be exploited by speakers as a dimension for phonetic enhancement (Kingston & Diehl 1994) in realizing a stop voicing contrast. In this talk I present phonetic production and corpus work on Japanese, investigating such an interaction between f0 and voicing in a pitch accent language.