[in Japanese]

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Electromyographic data on Thai and Suzhou Chinese are presented and physiological mechanism of the pitch control is discussed. Activation of the extrinsic muscle, sternohyoid (SH), contributes to low (or non-high) pitch initiation of a syllable. It also contributes to a relatively slow pitch fall of the falling tones, particularly in the non-high pitch range. Relaxation of the muscles are highly relevant in the initiation of pitch fall and rise: a quick fall from the high pitch range is initiated by suppressing the activity of cricothyroid (CT), and a pitch rise from the low pitch range is initiated by suppressing the activity of SH. The vocalis muscle (VOC) functions reciprocally with CT in the maintenance of the high pitch as well as in the vocal terminationof a syllable.

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In languages such as Japanese, hearers often encounter a sequence of more than two identical vowels. We investigated how, and to what extent a hearer can successfully segment each mora in such consecutive vowel series. In the following experimental reports, we particularly discuss effects of prosodic information such as pitch pattern and rhythm of speech. We argue that various kinds of information (pitch, rhythm, duration, lexical information) contribute to the segmentation of three or more consecutive vowels.

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The present paper compares the phonology of two typologically-unrelated languages, Japanese and Winnebago, and characterizes their 'accent' in terms of phonetic interpretation, basic tone melody, tonal rules, sonority hierarchy, prosodic structure (mora, syllable, foot, etc.), and word minimality. I will show that in spite of the existence of their apparently distinct typological and structural properties, these languages nonetheless exhibit striking similarities when seen from accentual typology in the generative paradigm, or universal grammar. My arguments will lead to the following specific claims: 1) they both are pitch-accent languages although they are different in some tonal rules; 2) they both are mora-counting, syllable-accenting languages and constitute a mirror-image pattern with distinct moraic structures; 3) in theoretical terms, they have moraic feet and foot extrametricality in common, which, however, are assigned from the opposite directions; and 4) they each have a distinct minimal word requirement, which is evidenced by the minimal size of a word and the existence of unaccented words. I will also demonstrate that the apparent diversities of their accentual characters directly follow from a few differences in rules and parameter values for tonal and prosodic structures.

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The distribution of sentence accents is shown to be regulated by cognitive-semantic factors. In particular, a model of sentence accent assignment for English is proposed which is comprised of two levels of derivation: one for pitch accent assignment as a semantic-phonological mapping process having access to the specific/nonspecific and action/nonaction distinctions, and the other for nucleus assignment as a genuine phonological process having access to the phonological phrase in the sense of prosodic phonology. The validity of the model is further shown by accentual facts in German, where the mapping process for pitch accent assignment in English is also operative, and in Danish, where the two semantic distinctions play slightly different roles from those which they play in English.

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[in Japanese]

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D. Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary has been totally revised for the 15th edition after an interval of twenty years. The writer would like to show some characteristics of the new edition by comparing it with the 14th edition. Of the new characteristics and devices, the most remarkable one is, above all, the introduction of American pronunciation, as well. The type of English described in the 15th edition is not RP but BBC English and 'network English' (American English). It can be said that the 15th edition holds a position as a pronouncing dictionary of world-wide English.

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This book is extensively revised edition of the author's 1962 textbook. The significant feature of the new edition can be found in the chapters 9-11, where basic notions and analytical methods of the digital speech processing are explained. Especially, the easy-to-understand explanations of Discrete Fourier Transform and Linear Predictor Coefficients are highly recommendable for all the linguistics and phoneticians who are interested in the computerized speech analysis but lacking the basics of linear mathematics and computer science.

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