• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.211-221
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• 2002

The prosody can play a crucial role in differentiating ambiguous sentences to correctly reflect their intended syntactic structures. In what way do the speakers in Tokyo and Sendai dialects of Japanese use prosodic elements to differentiate syntactic ambiguities? Acoustic measurement was made of utterances of ambiguous sentences in Japanese to observe prosodic strategies for disambiguation. Materials were sentences of the type ADV-VP1-NP-VP2, ADV-NP1-NP2-VP2, where the ambiguity lies in locative adverbial modification, ADV modifying either VP1 or VP2. For this construction the Japanese create the same ambiguities. After defining the depth of a syntactic boundary, F0 of the phrase before and after the boundary, and duration of the syllable and pause before the boundary were measured. The results show that Tokyo dialects speakers use F0 after syntactic boundary, and Sendai dialects speakers use of the syllable and/or pause before the boundary.