President Obama's public speeches and private dialogues were phonetically analyzed. Prominence, both in speeches and in dialogues, depended on pitch change most, pitch second, and sound pressure third. In the speeches, non-falling tones were used at the end of more than 1/3 of the tone groups and the percentage of non-falling tones at nuclei was around 40%. The speeches consisted of 60–70% speech and 40–30% pause. Although little difference was noticed in the frequency of pause appearance between the speeches and the dialogues, the average length of pause was more than 2.3 times in the speeches. The slow-down in the speeches was not caused by the rate of articulation but by the longer pauses. For emphasis, there were the rate reduction at the tone group to emphasize, or the sound lengthening at the item just before the emphasized tone group with the greatest rate, and conversely the rate elevation at the tone group preceding it.

While many findings of the three-pattern prosodic systems in both Ryukyuan and Japanese dialects have recently been achieved, this study focuses on the systems of the Okinoshima archipelago, which have long been reported to have three-pattern prosodic systems since back in the 1950s. Especially focusing on compounds of the Goka dialect in Okinoshima, the study shows that the basic prosodic rule for its compounds is the one in which the pattern of their ‘first’ members is preserved as the patterns of their compounds, and that all the exceptions to this rule appear as Pattern A. Based on this observation, the paper concludes that the most productive pattern in the compounds in Goka is Pattern A, while Pattern B the least productive. The paper further argues, referring to the prosodic patterns of loanwords, that the productivity of Pattern A in compounds may be due to the general tendency of the prosodic system of this dialect, in which the longer the word is, the more productive Pattern A becomes, while just the opposite tendency is observed for Pattern B.

The Ikema dialect of Miyako, Southern Ryukyuan, has a three-pattern accent system in which three tone classes (Types A, B, and C) are lexically contrastive, although the Type A simplex nouns are fewer. The biased distribution of tone classes is a consequence of the diachronic change, whereby Types A and B are merged together. This study aims to confirm that the three-pattern system in Ikema retains the proto-Ryukyuan system and to demonstrate that a set of words that are originally of Type A and share specific meanings are not merged into Type B.

In this paper, I describe the three-patterned accent system of the Miyako-Tarama variety of Southern Ryukyuan. The properties of the Tarama accent system can be summarized following three points: (i) it has three accent classes (F1, F2 and F0) and they are distinguishable according to existence or non-existence of falling pitch and the place of it; (ii) Prosodic Word (PWd), a prosodic unit which is mapped to a root or clitic more than 1 mora, make it possible to generalize the realization of those accent types; (iii) those three accent classes are neutralized in some environments.

The authors have discovered various types of three-pattern accent systems exist in the coastal area of the northeast of Fukui Pref., although it was considered in previous studies that dialects in the area have only two accent patterns or they have no lexical distinction of accent. This paper will outline accent systems of the three dialects (Kuriya, Kitagata, Antoh) and describe the characteristics of each dialect regarding domain of accent assignment or accent rules found in the process of suffixation or compounding. Also comparisons between the dialects will reveal what characteristics are commonly shared and which ones are not.

By investigating the accent of foreign words and place names, my opinion that the Onotsu dialect in Kikai-jima, Amami, has a three-pattern accent system is reconfirmed. The system is very complicated because of a combination of constraints of word length and special morae. The word length is pertinent to the position of an accent kernel. A long vowel and a moraic nasal have contrastive character in the accentuation of foreign words: in four-mora foreign words, all words ending in long vowels belong to the α-pattern, whereas all words ending in moraic nasals belong to the β-pattern.