Perception of Boundary and Prominence in Spontaneous Japanese: An RPT Study

Traditional studies on prosody argue that prominence is highly tied to changes of F0 but recent perceptual research of utterance-level prosodic prominence using Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) shows that perception strategy is much more complex, as it involves not only phonetic cues but also phonological, semantic and information cues. This paper considers Japanese in the RPT framework. Since it is a mora-timed pitch language and uses pitch both for lexical accent and utterance-level prosody, it is expected that Japanese has a different perception strategy from some Indo-European languages that use pitch movement for utterance-level prosody only. It is also expected that our study will provide concrete data for the hot topic in Japanese literature, ‘Does focal prominence reset a phrase boundary?’, based on the utterance-level perception experiment. We will show that (i) contra literature on Japanese focus, acoustic features of F0 and intensity are not strong prominence cues in Japanese, (ii) perceived prominence is strongly tied to pitch movement and its location in an utterance, and (iii) not only content words but also function morphemes get highlighted in Japanese. Perception strategies vary among languages, as predicted.