The last quarter of the 20^th century saw epoc-making changes for both of phonological and phonetic researches of Chinese language. Since the ancient time, numerous descriptive researches had certainly been done according to the traditional method, when the new wave which arrived from the western world in the 20^th century made them obsolete all of a sudden. In this paper I introduce two subjects which have aroused discussion in the new trends, that is, firstly how the internal rhythm of Chinese synchronizes with the system of stress accents, and secondly how the Chinese tone leads to the pitch contour.

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This paper presents an overview of the characteristics of intonation in Seoul Korean. After briefly reviewing previous studies on Korean accent and intonation, it describes the intonational characteristics of Seoul Korean with respect to intonational structure, accentual phrase, intonational phrase, declination, focus, syntactic structure, the relationship between accentual phrasing and their related phonological alternation, paralinguistic information and prosodic aspects of dialogue. This paper also introduces K-ToBI, a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. Finally, it identifies the intonation problems Japanese learners of Korean frequently have difficulty mastering.

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[in Japanese]

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The present study compared pitch contours of 25 German sentences read by two native speakers of standard German and 21 Japanese students. The students had been learning German twice a week for about 1.5 years at the time of recording. The study revealed some features in German intonation of native speakers and Japanese learners. The results are as follows: 1) Declination of pitch was observed in many of the sentences read by the native speakers. 2) One of the native speakers often employed a rising tone which takes the shape of a strongly slanted Italic S in contour. 3) In the sentences of the other native speaker, pitch peak tended to appear in one of the syllables before the stressed one ("early peak"), so that the constituent was often spoken in a falling tone. 4) "Hat pattern," which is claimed to be characteristic for German intonation was also observed for both native speakers, though not frequently for either of them. 5) In some instances, the native speakers seemed to estimate the informative value of a constituent differently, which caused its different accentuation. 6) Sentences read by some Japanese students showed almost flat pitch-contours, which are uncommon in those of the native speakers. 7) Japanese students sometimes reset pitch where no boundary actually lay, thus obstructing the declination of pitch in the sentence. 8) The Japanese students tended to put a high tone on the first syllable of a sentence. 9) They also tended to put a high tone on the stressed syllable of words. 10) They had difficulty in realizing the tone height appropriate to the informative value of a constituent. The results are illustrated in figures of pitch-contour of the German sentences used in this study.

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A brief survey of the main characteristics of French prosody is first presented. The intonation, accent rules, and rhythmic phenomena of French are described from the L2 leaner standpoint. The second section, which seeks to point out phonological transfer from LI to L2 during language acquisition, reviews typical errors for these characteristics made by Japanese learners of French and by French learners of Japanese. The last section is devoted to a concise discussion of the recent research trends and perspectives in French prosody.

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All monologue speech data in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese come with subjective impression rating scores regarding the way the monologue was spoken (fluent/disfluent, expressive/monotonous, confident/not-confident, relaxed/nervous and so on), an impression of the speakers' voice quality, and speaking rate. The relation among various evaluation keywords was analyzed using Hayashi's quantification type III (Principal Component Analysis for categorical data). The first two dimensions extracted from the pooled evaluation data of more than 1400 samples were interpreted as corresponding to an overall impression of "Positive-Negative" (the first dimension) and "Activity" (the second dimension). Multiple regression analysis between the scores along the first dimension and various characteristics extracted from speech samples revealed a high correlation between the "Fair-Poor" score and the pause-ratio of samples.

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[in Japanese]

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