Prosodic Features of Utterances in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese: Intonation Phrase–based Approach

It is unclear how the prosodic features in long spontaneous speech change. We focused on the F0 declination of an utterance to investigate the F0 transition by taking into consideration the length and syntactic structure of a Japanese utterance. In the case of an utterance without a strong syntactic boundary, the F0 range is fixed to a certain width, and the F0s decline toward the end of the utterance in that range. In addition, the F0s at the beginning of an utterance are slightly higher for a longer utterance. In the case of an utterance with a strong syntactic boundary, the F0 declination is reset at the strong syntactic boundary in the utterance, and the final lowering occurs only at the end.