Fundamental Frequency Range in Japanese and English: The Case of Simultaneous Bilinguals

Abstract

This article reports an experiment to test whether Japanese and English speakers vary their fundamental frequency (f0) range as a function of the language spoken. Speech samples of Japanese-(American) English simultaneous bilinguals (5 males, 5 females; all undergraduates at UC Berkeley) performing comparable reading tasks in their two native languages were analysed. The study builds on a relatively new approach to measuring f0 range that computes its high and low points from tonal targets in the intonational phonology. Unlike in most previous studies where f0 range is traditionally treated as a one-dimensional measure, f0 range in this study is measured along two quasi-independent dimensions: level and span. Findings revealed statistically significant crosslanguage differences between Japanese and English in both dimensions. This provides new insights into the relation between prosodic structure and f0 range in these two typologically different prosodic systems.

Between- and Within-Speaker Effects of Bilingualism on F0 Variation

“…Other linguistic and social constraints may also be involved. In the English-Japanese case [29], the authors note a difference in SF0 may be attributable in part to differences in prosodic phonology between the two languages: English has a wide range of available pitch accents while Japanese has only one. Our findings differ in that we find opposite trends across two languages from the same language family (French and Italian), suggesting a reduced importance of this factor.…”

“…In the case of prosody, within-speaker variation for bilinguals by language has also been demonstrated in several cases. Comparing Japanese-English bilinguals, [28] found that women (but not men) use a higher F0 mean in Japanese than in English, and [29] showed bilinguals to exhibit more F0 variability when speaking English than Japanese. [30] found that Welsh-English bilinguals use more F0 variability when speaking Welsh.…”

Bilingualism, pitch range and social factors: preliminary results from sequential Japanese-English bilinguals

“…Sentences from [7] were used for this project as they were considered to be favourable for pitch analysis, i.e. they contain a high amount of fully voiced segments to avoid F0 discontinuity associated with voiceless segments.…”

“…Moreover, the sentences were short enough to typically correspond to a single intonational phrase (IP), enabling to control for declination differences. The study in [7] used 20 sentences, comprising four different types of sentence, namely: A novel component was added to the elicitation procedure, namely addressees' photographs, to account for the effect of formality of the situation reported by Ohara [11]. Three types of addressee were chosen: (1) highly formal-looking addressees, i.e.…”

“…Some researchers have attributed differences in pitch to linguistic factors [7; 8] and others to socio-cultural constraints linked to 'being a female' in the Japanese society [9; 10; 11]. In particular, Graham [7] reported that Japanese-American English simultaneous bilinguals showed a higher pitch level and wider span in Japanese compared to English, irrespective of whether they are female or male, in a reading task. On the other hand, Ohara [10] reported that only female Japanese-American English bilinguals showed differences in pitch range when reading Japanese compared to English.…”