Prominence in a Pitch Language

Using production, perception, and processing experiments on understudied sentence- and utterance-levels, the authors explore how Japanese prominence is marked, perceived, and processed. The authors argue that Japanese functions as a pitch language, which marks prominence compositionally by lexical F0 boost and phrasal and boundary pitch movement.

Shinobu Mizuguchi is professor emeritus of linguistics at Kobe University. Koichi Tateishi is professor of linguistics at Kobe College.

Chapter 1 What is Prominence? How is it Perceived? Chapter 2 Non-focal and Focal Prominence Chapter 3 Focal Prominence on Lexical Word Chapter 4 Focal Prominence without Lexical Accent Chapter 5 Neurocognitive Processing of Prominence Chapter 6 Prominence in Spontaneous Japanese Chapter 7 What Does Prominence Do in Japanese?