Pitch Accent and Vowel Devoicing in Tokyo Japanese

Pitch accent realization requires voicing by its nature. However, high vowels are sometimes devoiced even though the vowel carries a pitch accent in Tokyo Japanese. This devoicing, then, would obliterate the pitch accent were it not for other e ects which preserve the presence and location of the accent. Previous studies showed that when the accented vowel is devoiced, there is either a pitch raising after the devoiced region or an accent shift to nearby moras. This paper focuses on those accent preservation effects. Two production experiments were conducted to see how various conditions, such as tonal context, boundary location, and syllabic environment, a ect the pitch accent preservation. Results show that pitch raising can be suppressed by tonal context, and accent shift does not always make up for the lack of pitch raising e ect. Accent shift is strictly governed by the boundary and syllabic conditions. Thus, only the presence of an accent can be retrieved from a pitch contour and accent location information is lost in those cases where neither pitch raising nor accent shift occurs. These results suggest that the function of accent location is not always crucial in Tokyo Japanese.