04 Dec 2001

Mika Ito

Here we discuss some of the problems regarding the unnaturalness of speech data currently used to research spoken Japanese politeness and proposes improved techniques. To extract natural unscripted utterances within a well-defined of vocabulary and contexts, a Map Task was employed with social status control between participants. To observe a perception side of spoken Japanese politeness, a rating experiment of formality was conducted. In this experiment, lexically similar but not identical tokens without any manipulation, were presented to raters for scoring the various utterances for their degree of formality. Magnitude Estimation (ME) was employed to reflect perceived distance of degree on ratings. Results show following findings. From the production side, it is not always the case, that raising the fundamental frequency (F0) is correlated with increasing formality or politeness. Also one speaker did not show significant difference in speech rate either. As neither F0 nor speech rate do seem to be dominant factors for judging formality, there is a need to explore other acoustic cues for conveying formality.

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