Final lowering and boundary pitch movements in spontaneous Japanese

Standard theory of the prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese treats both the final lowering and boundary pitch movements as the properties of utterance node. Validity of this treatment was examined by means of corpus-based analyses of spontaneous speech. The results showed that while final lowering could be treated as a property of utterance, boundary pitch movement could not. The latter should rather be treated as the property of accentual phrase. Based on these results, revised prosodic structure and annotation scheme were proposed.