AN ACOUSTIC-PHONETIC DESCRIPTION OF WORD TONE IN KAGOSHIMA JAPANESE
Abstract
The Japanese dialect of Kagoshima (KJ) has two different surface pitch patterns, (L)0HL and (L)0H. In this study, the properties of these two surface pitch patterns of KJ will be acoustically-phonetically described by means of z-score normalisation. Words consisting of two, three, four and five syllables were used in this study (the syllable structure is a CV) as test words, and the F0 of each syllable nucleus was extracted and the raw F0 values were z-score normalised. Two native speakers of KJ (one male and one female) participated in this study. The tonal representation of KJ words will be discussed on the basis of the z-score normalised results.