This paper compares listening strategies, especially prediction and inference, and cues used by intermediate Japanese learners (IJL) with those used by advanced learners and native Japanese speakers. The results show that IJL do not use listening strategies effectively, and that the cues used for different strategies are not the same. In the case of prediction strategy, IJL rely on longer and more important units; the cues for inference strategy are shorter and less important. Encouraging IJL to focus on the speaker's conclusion might help them to listen for longer and more important units, and it is expected that this will lead to better comprehension.

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract

[in Japanese]

View full abstract

We investigated whether syntactic complexity affects filler rate at phrase boundaries in Japanese presentation speeches. We examined filler rate immediately after dependent phrases (i.e., 'bunsetsu') as a function of the distance to their heads (measured as the number of intervening phrases). The filler rate monotonically increased with the distance, regardless of speaker's gender and presentation type. The results indicate that filler rate reflects speakers' cognitive load of grammatical encoding of a message. When we examined the rates of four frequent filler types, "ano", "e", "eto" and "ma", separately, we found that use of the four filler types differs depending on speaker's gender and presentation type. The results suggest that speakers need more time to formulate longer phrases and consequently are more likely to utter fillers in general, but that the choice of filler type is affected by speaker's gender and speech style.

View full abstract

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between syntactic structures and boundary pitch movements (BPMs) of accentual phrases such as rising and rising-falling tones based on a quantitative analysis of spontaneous Jananese monologs. We found that BPMs tend to occur more frequently at syntactically and semantically deep boundaries, and also that the BPM rate at syntactically shallow boundaries tends to increase as the distance from the weak or non-clause boundary to its modified bunsetsu phrases increases. These results suggest that BPMs could have the function of indicating the continuation of the utterance. We also discuss the relationship between the occurrence of BPMs and cognitive load in speech planning.

View full abstract

Prosodic features are often neglected in the stylistic analyses of spoken language. In this paper prosodic speaking style were automatically extracted from the label frequency data of the X-JToBI prosodic annotation as applied to the CSJ-Core. Principal component analysis of the data revealed three basic prosodic speaking styles. The first style is characterized by the use of boundary tone L% and the BI 2 (ordinary accentual phrase boundary). The second style is characterized by the combination of H% boundary tone and two BIs, 2 + b and 2 + bp (accentual phrase with boundary pitch movement, but without pitch resetting). The third style is characterized by the combination of HL% and BI 3 (intonation phrase boundary with pitch resetting). It also turned out that the second and third speaking styles showed almost opposite behavior when they are correlated with the Impression Rating Score data of the CSJ-Core. The second style tended to be evaluated as polite and punctual, while the third style tented to be evaluated as casual and relaxed. Lastly, it was shown that the impression of the utterances having the PNLP variant of the HL% boundary tone (that has its peak on the penult mora unlike the the ordinary variant of the HL% that has the peak on the last mora) were more similar to the impression of the second style than that of the third style.

View full abstract