F0 correlates of topic and subject in spontaneous Japanese speech

This paper examines F0 correlates of morphologically marked grammatical functions, in particular topic and subject, in spontaneous Japanese speech. Our data consist of F0 measurements of 7,106 nouns in the CallHome Japanese corpus of telephone conversations [4]. We find that topics exhibit higher peak F0 than subjects, contradicting information-structure accounts which predict that topics, which refer to ‘old’ information, should be less prominent. However, we suggest that the style and genre of speech is an important factor in this regard.