A Study of Pitch Patterns of Japanese EnglishAnalyzed Via Comparative Linguistic Features of English and Japanese

摘要

Certain defects in utterances of a word or phrase occur in English as spoken by Japanese native subjects, referred to in this article as Japanese English. This study considers such prosodic feature patterns as one of the most common causes of deficiencies in Japanese English. Japanese English is linguistically supposed to have the phonetic characteristics of the native language, Japanese. This supposition leads to the hypothesis that pitch patterns of Japanese English can be interpreted from the point of view of comparative linguistic features of English and Japanese, and that Japanese English would have better (i.e. closer to English) prosodic patterns if its particular characteristics were removed. In this study, the hypothesis was acoustically examined by means of a synthesis-by-analysis system, STRAIGHT, and then tested by listening experiments. Results of the experiments indicate practical verification of the hypothesis.