This paper examines potential prosodic cues for level of formality in Japanese conversational speech using speech data gathered via one-on-one interviews. Based on previous work on the phonetic properties of formality in Japanese (Ofuka et al. 2000, Ito 2002), further studies of Korean (Winter & Grawunder 2012) and Catalan Spanish (Hübscher, Borràs-Comes & Prieto 2017), and on a lab-based pilot study, the study examined properties of f0, intensity, pause frequency, and articulation rate via mixed effects regression models and a functional data analysis (Grabe, Kochanski & Coleman 2007, Ramsay 2006). Analysis of the speech data shows significant relationships between a number of prosodic variables and level of formality, and suggests that some of these relationships may apply cross-linguistically.

This paper examines potential acoustic cues for level of formality in Japanese conversational speech using speech data gathered outside the laboratory, with the objective of using any significant cues to develop a model to predict level of formality in spoken Japanese. Based on previous work on the phonetic properties of formality in Japanese [1],[2] and other languages [3], and on a pilot study of informal geminate contractions in Japanese (section 2), the study examined the mean f0, articulation rate, and f0 range (the difference between the minimum and maximum f0 in an utterance) via direct examination of the data and a functional data analysis [4], [5].Analysis of the speech data shows significant relationships between all three variables and level of formality, and a binary logistic regression indicates that the variables have some potential as predictors of formality independent of lexical cues, although further refinement of any model will be necessary.In order to obtain appropriate conversational Japanese speech data to analyze, the decision was made to create a new small corpus. Although other corpora of spoken Japanese exist, notably the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese [9] and the Chiba 3-way conversation corpus [10], they were judged to be