Abstract
This paper is concerned with the effect of accentual fall on final lengthening in Japanese. A series of experiments have revealed that in isolated utterances the final vowels of words with no accentual fall are significantly longer by about 40ms than those with accentual fall. Also, in phrases composed of a noun and a particle /no/ plus phrase-final noun, a similar amout of final lengthening is observed the phrase-final nouns with no accentual fall, but not for their counterparts with accentual fall. These results suggest that unaccented or finally-accented words have their final vowels lengthened in the utterance final position as a means of marking the end of utterances.
