‘Pitch accent’ and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic: Reassessing the role of contact

This paper considers the origin of ‘pitch accents’ in Scottish Gaelic with a view to evaluating the hypothesis that this feature was borrowed from North Germanic varieties spoken by Norse settlers in medieval Scotland. It is shown that the ‘pitch accent’ system in Gaelic is tightly bound with metrical structure (more precisely syllable count), certainly diachronically, and probably (at least in some varieties) synchronically. Gaelic ‘pitch accent’ is argued to be a plausible internal development, parallel to similar phenomena in other branches of Celtic (specifically in Breton), as well as in Germanic. This conclusion may appear to undermine the contact hypothesis, especially in the absence of reliable written sources; nevertheless, a certain role for Norse-Gaelic contact in the appearance of the pitch accent system cannot be completely exclude

Japanese pitch accent in an English/Nupe/Hausa trilingual

Pitch accent, which distinguishes words in Standard Japanese, is difficult for speakers of English to acquire. This is likely to be because pitch in English does not have lexical function. However, alternative explanations could be insufficient Standard Japanese input or lack of explicit instruction. This paper reports on an English/Nupe/Hausa trilingual learner of Japanese who uses Standard Japanese pitch accent accurately, in spite of no residence in Japan or explicit instruction on pitch accent. Nupe and Hausa are tonal i.e. have lexical pitch. The aim of the paper is to report on the accuracy and stability of the participant’s pitch accent; to consider how their language background has aided this acquisition, and to discuss implications for monolingual English speaking learners of Japanese. The data consists of a three minute audio recording of a presentation given in Japanese. The participant produced 90% of words with accurate Standard Japanese pitch accent and 93% of repeated words with accurate stable pitch accent. The participant’s successful acquisition of pitch accent is argued to be because of the presence of lexical pitch in Nupe and Hausa. Since they achieved this despite no explicit instruction, stay in Japan, or a native-speaker tutor, the difficulty monolingual English speakers have acquiring pitch accent cannot be easily dismissed due to lack of explicit instruction or input. This finding provides support for the argument that English speakers’ difficulty acquiring Japanese pitch accent is due to pitch not being lexical in English. However, other bilinguals (English + tone language) are needed to strengthen this claim

Including Pitch Accent Optionality in Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis

A significant variability in pitch accent placement is found when comparing the patterns of prosodic prominence realized by different English speakers reading the same sentences. In this paper we describe a simple approach to incorporate this variability to synthesize prosodic prominence in unit selection text-to-speech synthesis. The main motivation of our approach is that by taking into account the variability of accent placements we enlarge the set of prosodically acceptable speech units, thus increasing the chances of selecting a good quality sequence of units, both in prosodic and segmental terms. Results on a large scale perceptual test show the benefits of our approach and indicate directions for further improvements. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection, prosodic prominence, pitch accent

Japanese pitch accent acquisition by learners of Japanese: Effects of training on Japanese accent instruction, perception, and production

This dissertation investigated 1) American L2 learners' perceptual ability to accurately identify Japanese pitch accent, and 2) learners' realization of Japanese pitch accent. This study was conducted to determine whether these abilities could be improved through training. Study 1 tested the ability to identify the accent location (pitch fall) in a word across all proficiency levels of L2 learners. This investigated whether learners improved as they progressed through their Japanese language study. Study 1 also analyzed the results of learners who were not adept at identifying the accent. Study 2 conducted Japanese pitch accent training. Six 30-minute training sessions were conducted over the course of one month. Training was designed based on a pedagogical framework that aimed to raise L2 learners' awareness of Japanese pitch accent, and improve their self-monitoring skills. During training, effective approaches and techniques were also utilized to foster L2 learners' perceptual and production ability for Japanese pitch accent. Pretest and posttest results from both the experimental group (trainees) and control group (non-trainees) were analyzed. Results showed that the training had a significant effect on both perception and production. Trainees significantly improved their perceptual ability for Japanese pitch accent, whereas no statistical improvement was shown in the control group. Trainees improved their ability for almost all accentual pattern conditions (1st accent, 2nd accent, 3rd accent words). This improvement was not limited to the words that they practiced during training, but also extended to new words. Trainees also improved significantly in their production, but this improvement was also found in the control group. However, the improvements of the experimental group for 1st and 2nd accent words, and the production (without accent information condition) were significantly greater than those of the control group. These results suggest that learners perceptual and production ability of Japanese pitch accent improved through the three hours of training that this study implemented. After training, students were able to understand the accent feedback provided to them. The positive results obtained in this study suggest that the normal language curriculum could benefit by adopting similar training methods for Japanese pitch accent perception and production

Pitch Accent in Korean

Typologically, pitch-accent languages stand between stress languages like Spanish and tone languages like Shona, and share properties of both. In a stress language typically just one syllable per word is accented and bears the major stress (cf. Spanish sábana ‘sheet’, sabána ‘plain’, Panamá). In a tone language the number of distinctions grows geometrically with the size of the word. So in Shona, which contrasts high vs. low tone, trisyllabic words have eight possible pitch patterns. In a canonical pitch-accent language such as Japanese, just one syllable (or mora) per word is singled out as distinctive, as in Spanish. But each syllable in the word is assigned a high or low tone (as in Shona); however, this assignment is predictable based on the location of the accented syllableKeywords: tonal accent, diachrony, phonetic realization, compounds, phonological phrases, loanwords, frequency, reconstructio

How to Tell Beans from Farmers: Cues to the Perception of Pitch Accent in Whispered Norwegian

East Norwegian employs pitch accent contours in order to make lexical distinctions. This paper researches listeners' ability to make lexical distinctions in the absence of f0 (ie. whispered speech) as the listener attempts to determine which pitch accent word token best fits into a whispered ambiguous utterance in spoken Norwegian. The results confirm that local syntactic context alone is not a reliable cue to assist in lexical selection and concur with Fintoft (1970) in suggesting that listeners utilise a separate prosodic cue, possibly syllable duration or intensity, to make the pitch accent distinction in whispered speech

Is pitch accent necessary for comprehension by native Japanese speakers? - An ERP investigation

Not unlike the tonal system in Chinese, Japanese habitually attaches pitch accents to the production of words. However, in contrast to Chinese, few homophonic word-pairs are really distinguished by pitch accents (Shibata & Shibata, 1990). This predicts that pitch accent plays a small role in lexical selection for Japanese language comprehension. The present study investigated whether native Japanese speakers necessarily use pitch accent in the processing of accent-contrasted homophonic pairs (e.g., ame [LH] for 'candy' and ame [HI] for 'rain') measuring electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials. Electrophysiological evidence (i.e., N400) was obtained when a word was semantically incorrect for a given context but not for incorrectly accented homophones. This suggests that pitch accent indeed plays a minor role when understanding Japanese. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

L’accentuation québécoise : une approche tonale

Cet article basé sur une analyse de trois locuteurs cherche à apporter des éléments d’éclaircissement sur les notions d’accent tonal et d’accent dynamique et sur les modalités de réalisation des accents tonals complexes dans le français québécois spontané.This article based on an analysis of three speakers aims at clarifying the distinction between stress accent and pitch accent in French and contributes evidence on the modalities of phonetic implementation of a complex pitch accent in spontaneous Quebec French

Perception of Prosodic Modulations of Linguistic and Paralinguistic Origin: Evidence From Early Auditory Event-Related Potentials

How listeners handle prosodic cues of linguistic and paralinguistic origin is a central question for spoken communication. In the present EEG study, we addressed this question by examining neural responses to variations in pitch accent (linguistic) and affective (paralinguistic) prosody in Swedish words, using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. The results indicated that changes in pitch accent and affective prosody elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) responses at around 200 ms, confirming the brain’s pre-attentive response to any prosodic modulation. The MMN amplitude was, however, statistically larger to the deviation in affective prosody in comparison to the deviation in pitch accent and affective prosody combined, which is in line with previous research indicating not only a larger MMN response to affective prosody in comparison to neutral prosody but also a smaller MMN response to multidimensional deviants than unidimensional ones. The results, further, showed a significant P3a response to the affective prosody change in comparison to the pitch accent change at around 300 ms, in accordance with previous findings showing an enhanced positive response to emotional stimuli. The present findings provide evidence for distinct neural processing of different prosodic cues, and statistically confirm the intrinsic perceptual and motivational salience of paralinguistic information in spoken communication