Osaka and Kagoshima Japanese citation tone acoustics: A linguistic-tonetic comparative study

The pitch realisations of the accentual systems in Osaka Japanese (OJ) and Kagoshima Japanese (KJ) have been auditorily described in detail, and analysed within various phonological frameworks. However, little linguistic-phonetic descriptive research has been undertaken on the accent types of Japanese dialects in such a way as to enable a cross-dialectal comparison of their acoustic realisation. In this study, linguistic-tonetic representations of OJ and KJ tonalities are derived from normalised acoustic representations for pitch patterns conventionally described as LH, LHL, LLH and LLLH. A comparison of these representations across the two dialects demonstrates some significant differences in the acoustic realisation of the H/L units. The implications of these observed differences for surface tonal representation of KJ within Autosegmental-Metrical theory are also explored.