Revisiting f0 Range Production in Japanese-English Simultaneous Bilinguals

Abstract

This study reports an experiment in which 10 Japanese-American English simultaneous bilinguals (5 males, 5 females; all undergrads at the University of California, Berkeley) were recorded performing comparable reading tasks in their two languages. The study builds on a relatively new approach to measuring f0 range - proposed by Patterson 2000 and operationalised in Mennen et al. 2012 - that computes its high and low points from actual tonal targets in the inton ational phonology. Also, unlike in most previous studies where f0 range is traditionally treated as a one-dimensional measure, f0 range in both languages was measured along two quasi-independent dimensions: level and span. The results reveal that Japanese was realised at a significantly higher level and with a wider range of frequencies (span) than English. This finding provides new insights into the relation between intonational structure and f0 range in two typologically different prosodic systems.