Pitch Downtrend in Nagasaki Japanese

This paper analyzes phonetic realization of word tone in Nagasaki Japanese, which has twocontrastive word tones. A Tone A word is realized with a sharp pitch fall, and a Tone B word is realized with no pitch fall. Although many studies investigated the intonation in Tokyo Japanese, little attention has been paid to intonational structure in the dialect. This study conducts two acoustic-phonetic experiments in Nagasaki Japanese, and reveals that 1) a pitch fall compresses the pitch range in the following words if the word also has a falling tone, and 2) F0 contour does not reflect the difference of branching structure. The results are different from pitch patterns in other Japanese dialects, and imply the need for further investigation of syntaxphonology mapping in many Japanese dialects.