Foreign accent in intonation patterns-a contrastive study applying a quantitative model of the F0 contour

The study presented examines the influence of intonational contrasts of German and Japanese on the F₀ patterns of Japanese learners of German. It was found that Japanese learners generally place the word accent in compound words on the right-most (the generic) term which suggests that they adopt rules of accent concatenation of Japanese. In contrast to native speakers of German, they tend to place substantially more falling accents at utterance-medial phrase boundaries. The intonational patterns for marking questions are different from those found in utterances of German speakers, where generally only yes/no questions feature a question final rise. Prosodic phrases in the Japanese group are generally shorter and are often not determined by the linguistic content of an utterance but by the occurrence of phonetically `difficult´ or possibly unknown words