We witnessed remarkably rapid development of the linguistic study of intonation during the last 25 years or so. Two main factors that seemed to enabled this development were analyzed in the first half of the paper, namely, progresses in the generative grammatical treatment of intonation, and, development of digital speech processing technology. The last half of the paper was devoted to the discussion of current issues that requires further investigation; these include classification of paralinguistic information, definition of accentual phrase in Japanese, classification of phrase-final intonation contours, intonation of dialects, phonetic features other than the F0 that contribute to the perception of intonation, and, issues related to the techniques of digital speech analysis.

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[in Japanese]

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This report is a synthesis of the multiple studies that introduces systematic relations between prosodic feature of speeches and impressions of speakers' personality. These studies utilize speech stimuli synthesized by manipulating the speech-rate and fundamental frequencies. The results suggest that it is possible to approximate the impressions of personality characteristics from prosodic features in the synthesized speech. The effects of familiarity and naturalness in intonations on the personality impressions are also discussed in relation to the dialectal regions. Responding to the recent progress in the technology to manipulate speech sound, the report concludes with the future directions and possibilities to investigate the expressive speech sound.

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The purpose of this paper is to introduce characteristics of loudness control in realizing prominent syllables by Japanese learners of English. More specifically, the phonetic features peculiar to RMS (Root Mean Square) envelopes gained in the utterances by Japanese learners will be treated and pedagogical suggestions to correct these features will be made. After reviewing the previous studies on intonation, intonational characteristics by Japanese will be summarized in the order of tonality, tonicity, and tone. Then, the production experiment designed to compare phonetic realizations of prominent syllables by both native speakers of English and Japanese will be introduced. Finally, the problems with pronunciation training programs and software will be pointed out and suggestions for better training of rhythm will be put forward.

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Through searches on the Internet using Google, 396 adjective expressions that immediately precede the noun kutyoo (tone of voice) were identified as candidates for the major types of Japanese speech styles. Thirty-seven percent of them characterize the speaker's emotional, physical or social state, 31% describe the social or psychological relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and 17% concern the styles used in particular situations or of particular speakers. Comparisons with the results of other searches using Google performed 11 months later and with those using Yahoo! JAPAN Search revealed that there are 16 kutyoos that are constantly used with high frequency on the Internet. They are, in frequency order, tuyoi (strong), meeree (commanding), yasasii (gentle), teeneena (polite), kibisii (severe), odayakana (mild), ikari (angry), karui (light, not heavy), sizukana (quiet), tantantosita (plain), kitui (stern), otituita (calm), hagesii (violent), setumee (explaining), reesee (cool), and dantee (assertive) tones of voice. A multidimensional scaling analysis of perceived similarities among these kutyoos suggests that they can be grouped into 12 categories of speech style.

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[in Japanese]

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This paper analyzes the accentuation of so-called alphabetic acronyms in Kinki Japanese with main focus on the effects that the syllable structure and familiarity of a word exert on its accent pattern. The data obtained from an original fieldwork show that the initial tone of alphabetic acronyms in Kinki Japanese is determined by their phonological length, i.e., number of moras involved, and their syllable structure. These phonological factors are quite similar to those that are responsible for the unaccented pattern observed in loanwords and alphabetic acronyms in Tokyo Japanese. This study has also revealed a certain correlation between the speaker's familiarity with a word and the ratio at which the word violates shiki-hozon, a tone preservation rule exhibited by compound words.

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