[cranks]

Originally Posted by steven

I think it should be noted that intonation varies depending on the region in Japan, but either way the intonation of words is pretty solid (as in extremely important for words and phrases to be understood). English is very much the same way though (with emphasis on stress as well as pitch).

That's right. intonation varies depending on the dialect, and I was only talking about Tokyo accent or 標準語 with the おはようございます example. My point I guess is that in Japanese, in any dialect AFAIK, once the pitch goes up, you can not go down until you reach the accented phoneme so you will be talking at the higher pitch for a while, while in English, you go up at the stressed syllable for like 0.1 second and immediately go down to the base pitch.

The elevation of the pitch happens in English too, I don't see many English speakers on TV who speak only with low voice, except may be Larry King :P Most of the people employ high voice here and there, but it immediately goes right back down so they don't sound like they are speaking with high voice. In Japanese though, even a lot of men do sound like they are speaking with high voice like these people.

YouTube - ジャパネットたかた　夢のコラボ映像　二代目はこの人 しかいない！！
YouTube - 今田東野ナイナイの芸能界ダメならぬがねば!![1994]

Now, there definitely some girls who want to look Kawaii too, but I also hear stories about girls who deliberately talk lower so they don't sound like they are affecting high voice. Anime voice is generally not an attraction even in Japan.

アニメ声　悩み　女 - Google Search

So, why do Japanese girls affect high voice? Probably the same reason American people speak more dynamically when they are on TV or in a formal setting. But the tonal quality of their voice makes it sound higher, and also the pitch accent nature of Japanese language dictates higher pitch to be held longer than English.

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

Thanks to all. And welcome to the site, cranks!

Thanks for the welcome Kyle, I actually found and read through several papers but unfortunately none of them had conducted a study that reliably displays that Japanese girls employ significantly higher voice in a social situations compared with men and women with other nationalities. The number of participants are usually very small, one of the more referenced papers only studied 10 people with 2 Japanese females, and there isn't any decent comparison to men and other nationalities, so this is the least third-rate hypothesis-ish I can be. Here are some of the better papers I found if you are interested.

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http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/al.../yuasa1998.pdf