On the levels of accentuation in spoken Japanese

Accentuation serves to express both the discrete information concerning the accent type of a prosodic word and the continuous information concerning its prominence. The paper examines the latter aspect of accentuation using recorded radio news read by announcers. The amplitude of the accent command was extracted from an F₀ contour and used as an index for the level of accentuation. Statistical analysis of the accent command amplitude confirmed the difference between accented and unaccented types. Further analysis of the relationship between amplitudes of two adjoining accent commands also revealed a marked difference in characteristics of these two types