Accentual Phrasing in Japanese: The Significance of Underlying Accents

The Focus-Independent Effect of Tonal Proximity on the Realization of Lexical Pitch Accent in Tokyo Japanese and Bermeo Basque

Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and the Northern Bizkaian dialects of Basque (NBB) are known to have similar pitch accent systems, and in both languages the focus status of words affects the prosodic phrasing. A cross-linguistic experiment was conducted to investigate whether the effect of tonal proximity on the phonetic realization of lexical pitch accent is conditioned by focus-related prosodic phrasing ...

Accent-meter alignment in Japanese vocal music

Sunghye Cho, University of Pennsylvania There is an ongoing debate about the nature of pitch accents. Even in Tokyo Japanese (TJ), which is the most widely cited pitch-accent language, the pitch accent is analyzed in two distinct ways: an accentual approach and a tonal one ([2, 3, 4, 7], among others). In the accentual approach (1a), an accent marks the position of a pitch drop from High (H) to...

A prosodic phrasing model for a Korean text-to-speech synthesis system

This paper presents a prosodic phrasing model for Korean to be used in a textto-speech synthesis (TTS) system. Read text corpora were morpho-syntactically parsed and prosodically labeled following the Penn Korean Treebank [Han et al., 2002] and K-ToBI prosodic labeling conventions [Sun-Ah, 2000] respectively. Decision trees were trained with morpho-syntactic and textual distance features to pre...

Focus and Morpho-Syntax in Korean Accentual Phrasing

The Role of Pitch Range Reset in Korean Sentence Processing

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners’ processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean li...