How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite

Abstract This study examines phonetic cues used to express politeness in spoken Japanese. The tasks of producing polite and non-polite speech in two different types of sentences (a question and a polite imperative) and in attitudinal speech (a request and a decline) were used to examine various F0 and temporal aspects of polite speech. Eight sentences spoken by 18 native speakers were acoustically measured at both sentence level and sentence final mora level. It was found that Japanese native speakers generally use a slower speech rate and a breathy voice for polite speech, but not necessarily a high pitched voice or wider pitch range, even in the case of female speakers. The use of pitch was found to be attitude dependent, but was not affected by the sentence type. Clear gender differences were seen in various phonetic aspects. Some politeness strategies observed at individual level are also reported.