Natasha WARNER
Final accent, dialects, and the
perception of Japanese tones.
Abstract:In this report, I discuss results confirming that final accented and
unaccented words are different within the word, particularly for long
(4-5 mora) words. A perception experiment showed that listeners
do not perceive this difference more accurately with long words than
with short, however, and that Tokyo speakers are more likely than
Kansai speakers to perceive it. Finally, an experiment on perception
of accent contrasts in different dialects showed that while few Tokyo
listeners can identify Kansai accent distinctions, Kansai listeners are
often better at perceiving Tokyo distinctions than their own. This
indicates that Kansai listeners will also be critical of accent mistakes
in speech synthesis.