Effects of accent on vowel amplitude in Japanese

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Abstract
It has long been known that accent (i.e., lexical stress) is a major factor contributing to variations in both vowel duration and vowel amplitude in English. An earlier experiment [Beckman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71, S1 (1952)] showed that, by contrast to English, Japanese accentual patterns have only a minimal effect on duration patterns. The present experiment compared accentual effects on amplitude in the two languages. It measured vowel amplitudes in a smaller subset of the minimally contrasting Japanese word pairs used earlier, as well as in a set of comparable English pairs. Three measures of vowel amplitude were obtained; namely, peak amplitude, average amplitude, and total amplitude. All three measures performed substantially worse as criteria for accent in Japanese than in English.

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