Projectability of Transition-Relevance Places Using Prosodic Features in Japanese Spontaneous Conversation

In this paper, to clarify acoustic features for predicting the ends of utterances, we investigated prosodic features that project transition relevance places in Japanese spontaneous conversation. Acoustic parameters used as the prosodic features are the fundamental frequency, power, and mora duration of accentual phrases and words. Results showed that the fundamental frequency and power at the beginning of the final accentual phrase indicate whether the utterance includes utterance-final elements, which are the syntactic cue for detecting the end-ofutterance. In addition, the mora duration lengthened in the final accentual phrase. That is, these prosodic features around the beginning of the final accentual phrase showed the characteristic changes that make hearers predict the transition relevance places.