Phonological and Phonetic Effects of Minor Phrase Length on f0 in Japanese

The Minor Phrase (MiP, aka accentual phrase) is the prosodic constituent that immediately dominates the prosodic word (PWd) in the prosodic structure hierarchy; it may consist of one or more PWd. In Japanese all MiPs are marked by an initial LH rise. This paper examines the scaling of the initial rise in single-word MiPs in Japanese as a function of the syllable/mora length of the word constituting the MiP, the position of the MiP with respect to edges of prosodic major phrase (MaP), and the composition of MiP in terms of lexical accent. These rises are found to be subject to two types of scaling: (i) local, edge-based scaling, specifically the upward “resetting” of f0 seen at the left edge of MaP (aka intermediate phrase) [1, 2 3], and (ii) global, lookahead-based scaling, in this case the upward scaling of the f0 of MiP-initial peaks as a function of the overall length of the MiP in terms of syllables/moras. Word length also turns out to have an indirect influence on local, edge-based scaling in Japanese, since it can be shown that word length has an effect on the number and distribution of major and minor prosodic phrases in the phonological representation as well. 1. Background and Findings For Japanese, it has been shown that the left edge of a prosodic MaP, which typically appears at the left edge of a major syntactic phrase, is the context for a significant upward “resetting” of pitch [5, 6, 1, 2, 4]. [2] and [4] explicitly compare the realization of LH rises at the left edges of MiPs which coincide with the left edge of MaP to MiP-initial rises that are medial in MaP and find the former to be significantly higher. (These results are replicated in the present experiment.) Such an effect of prosodic organization on f0 realization is local and edge-based insofar as the phonetic realization mechanism can produce these effects in conditions defined locally, in proceeding from left to right in the utterance. Some have claimed that the overall word or syllable count of an utterance must be a factor in f0 realization [7]. The existence, or even possibility, of this sort of global, lookahead effect has been contested [8], and no lookahead effect has to our knowledge been reported for Japanese. In our recent research, however, we have found a syllable or mora-counting lookahead effect at the level of the MiP in Japanese—the longer the anticipated MiP, the greater the initial rise, and the higher the initial peak. The paper also reports an effect of the syllable/mora count of MiPs that is phonological in kind: words consisting of 3 moras contrast with words consisting of 5 and 7 moras in their ability to stand alone as MiPs in the larger prosodic structure. So word length here too does have an (indirect) effect on the phonetic realization of f0, insofar as it influences the prosodic structure of the output phonological representation, which is input to the phonetics.