2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Reconstruction of the theory of Japanese prosodic structure based upon the quantitative analysis of spontanoues speech data

Research Project

Project/Area Number	23520483
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Section	一般
Research Field	Linguistics
Research Institution	National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
Principal Investigator	MAEKAWA Kikuo 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, 言語資源研究系, 教授 (20173693)
Project Period (FY)	2011 – 2013
Keywords	韻律構造 / 日本語 / filled pause / final lowering
Research Abstract	As for disfluency, it was shown that the height of filled pauses can be predicted given the linguistic tones of the preceding and following accentual phrases. Prosodic structure of utterance needs not to include the specification of tone for filled pauses. As for declination, the domain of final lowering was examined. It turned out that the domain of final lowering was the final accentual phrase of an utterance, but in the utterances with deep syntactic boundary, the domain could include the penult accentual phrase. This finding put an end to long-standing debate about the domain of final lowering. Lastly, statistical analyses of the occurence frequency of prosodic events revealed that it was possible to predict the gender (sex) and age of the speakers with the accuracy of about 70% (in the case of gender) and 60% (in the case of age group).