Perception of acoustic cues to Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent contrasts in native Japanese and naive English listeners

This study examines how native language shapes the perception of a prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, a high-low pitch accent is a lexical property of a word, and the F-0 fall after the peak associated with the accented syllable is the fundamental cue to accent perception. In English, pitch accents do not create lexically contrastive F-0 patterns. A hypothesis that English listeners naive to Japanese use the F-0 fall cue less than Japanese listeners was tested in two experiments. The alignment of F-0 peak, the presence and magnitude of F-0 fall were manipulated in a trisyllabic nonword to resynthesize Japanese 1st-syllable accented, 2nd-syllable accented, and unaccented patterns. In an AX-discrimination experiment, both listener groups showed sensitivity to the presence of F-0 fall at every peak location. In a categorization experiment, the English group did not use the F-0 fall cue in decisions about whether the 1st or the 2nd syllable sounded more prominent. The Japanese group relied on the F-0 fall information, some listeners much heavily than others. These findings suggest that one's native language constrains how much attention the prosodic dimension of F-0 change receives and that individual listeners may have qualitatively different perceptual strategies. (C) 2015 Acoustical Society of America. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4922468]