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Updated: Aug 27, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Asymmetrical roles of segment and pitch accent in Japanese spoken word recognition
Hironori Katsuda1, Jeremy Steffman2
1Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
Abstract:
This study examines the roles of segment and pitch accent in Japanese spoken word recognition. In a lexical decision task, it replicates the finding of Cutler and Otake [(1999) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 105(3), 1877-1888] that pitch accent restricts word activation with a more comprehensive, rigorous experimental design. Furthermore, results uncover an asymmetrical role of segment and pitch accent in word recognition in Japanese: words primed by a pitch accent-matching prime are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words primed by a segment-matching prime.
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