• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.187-200
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• 2002

The purpose of the present study is to see in terms of $F_{0}$ variation in Japanese how discourse focus and the lexical word accent interact with each other in realizing overall intonation patterns. Discourse focus causes prosodic restructuring of phrase structures and, as a result, largely affects pitch contours, whereas the lexical word accent is said to delimit the $F_{0}$ into a certain range. Measurement of $F_{0}$ was made of utterances of Japanese sentences to observe behavior of pitch contours with varied focus assignment and lexical accent specifications. The utterances were obtained in question-answer discourse contexts so that in a sentence, either one NP was always focused or no focus was assigned. I set four points for $F_{0}$ measurement; $F_{1s},F_{1m}, F_{2s}$, and $F_{2m}$, two for each noun phrase corresponding to $F_{0}$ at the beginning of the first syllable and that of the vocalic portion of the second syllable in the two NP's. The results of present study were as follows: (1) for all combination of lexical accent types, the $F_{0}$ rise both in NP1 and NP2 are higher when focused than when not focused. (2) NP2 starts a new accentual phrase when focused, showing even higher $F_{0}$ than NP1, the latter of which implies that in forming a new accentual phrase by focusing, catathesis does not seem to take effect on NP2 preceded by accented NP1. (3) unfocused NP2 preceded by unaccented NP1 has higher $F_{0}$ than those preceded by accented NP1.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.3-15
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• 2014

An articulatory study (using an Electromagnetic Articulography, EMA) was conducted to explore effects of prosodic boundary strength (Intonational Phrase/IP versus Word/Wd), and focus (Focused/accented, Neutral, Unfocused/unaccented) on the kinematic realization of /m/ in the coda (${\ldots}$am#i${\ldots}$) and the onset (${\ldots}$a#mi${\ldots}$) conditions in Korean. (Here # refers to a prosodic boundary such as an IP or a Wd boundary). Several important points have emerged. First, the boundary effect on /m/s was most robustly observed in the temporal dimension in both the coda (IP-final) and the onset (IP-initial) conditions, generally in line with cross-linguistically observable boundary-related lengthening patterns. Crucially, however, in contrast with boundary-related slowing-down effects that have been observed in English, both the IP-final and IP-initial temporal expansions of Korean /m/s were not accompanied by an articulatory slowing down. They were, if anything, associated with a faster movement in the lip opening (release) phase (into the vowel). This suggests that the mechanisms underlying boundary-related temporal expansions may differ between languages. Second, observed boundary-induced strengthening effects (both spatial and temporal expansions, especially on the IP-initial /m/s) were remarkably similar to prominence (focus)-induced strengthening effects, which is again counter to phrase-initial strengthening patterns observed in English in which boundary effects are dissociated from prominent effects. This suggests that initial syllables in Korean may be a common focus for both boundary and prominence marking. These results, taken together, imply that the boundary-induced strengthening in Korean is different in nature from that in English, each being modulated by the individual language's prosodic system. Third, the coda and the onset /m/s were found to be produced in a subtly but significantly different way even in a Wd boundary condition, a potentially neutralizing (resyllabification) context. This suggests that although the coda may be phonologically 'resyllabified' into the following syllable in a phrase-medial position, its underlying syllable affiliation is kinematically distinguished from the onset.