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.

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?