Pitch pattern alternation in goshogawara Japanese: evidence for a prosodic phrase above the domain for downstep

The lexically accented words in Goshogawara Japanese can be realized in either of the two surface pitch patterns. The pitch pattern is said to alternate regularly, depending on the phrasing structure of an utterance. The organization of prosodic phrasing of this dialect, however, has been little investigated and thus it remains unclear what prosodic phrase functions as the domain for the alternation. This work determines the level of the phrase serving as the domain for the pitch pattern alternation. Is it hierarchically higher or lower than the domain for downstep? The experimental results reveal that the alternation does not take place at the prosodic boundary where downstep effect is blocked. The results provide evidence for the phrasing onelevel above the downstep domain, whose existence was not evident in the model proposed for Tokyo Japanese.