Toward processing of prosody in spontaneous Japanese

Abstract

This paper considers how prosody in spontaneous Japanese is processed. We have conducted Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) perception experiments on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and investigated how boundaries and prominences are perceived. We recruited three groups of participants from different Japanese dialects and found that (i) F0 is not a strong prominence cue in Japanese, contra Japanese literature on focus prominence (Pierrehumbert & Beckman (P&B) 1988; Kori 1989; Ishihara 2016) and (ii) Japanese allows multi-headed and headless intonation phrases, and P&B’s reset theory, i.e. focal prominence resets boundary phrases, faces empirical difficulties. We also found that (iii) both content words and function morphemes get highlighted in Japanese, and (iv) perception strategies vary cross-dialectally and listeners from different dialects perceive boundaries and prominences differently.