Abstract
This study attempts to explore an initial high pitch characteristically observed in English sentences produced by Japanese speakers. The experimental results have revealed that about half or more native Japanese participants (college students majoring in English) produced unfocused subject pronouns I, they, you, and it in sentence-initial position at a higher pitch than they did lexical verbs that followed. In three sentence-initial articles, however, the phenomenon was not observed, whereas monosyllabic prepositions showed a smaller degree of the initial high pitch depending on their syllable structures. These results suggest that the transfer of Japanese sentence-initial intonation patterns and interference from Japanese phonological and syntactic structures are involved in the occurrence of the initial high pitch.
