Introduction

The prosodic structure and accompanying intonational “melody” of an utterance can provide a rich source of information to the sentence-processing mechanism. In spoken language, speakers mark prominences and group words into prosodic constituents by varying the pitch, timing, and other aspects of the voice. The intonational contour resulting from these variations can provide listeners with cues to the syntactic structure, information structure, and a variety of other linguistic structures. Thus, a crucial part of our understanding of spoken-language processing is our understanding of prosody, and how this structure maps onto the linguistic structures that we parse.

This chapter introduces Standard (Tokyo) Japanese prosodic structure and intonation, and outlines one of the most recent descriptions of Japanese intonation, the Japanese ToBI system. Then, it summarizes the literature on the mapping between prosodic structure and syntactic structure including recent studies examining the role of prosody in Japanese sentence processing, even in silent reading.

Japanese prosodic structure and intonation

Japanese intonation has been described from a variety of theoretical perspectives, ranging from mathematical models employing a composite of superimposed curves (e.g. Fujisaki & Sudo, 1971; Venditti & van Santen, 2000) to phonological models employing abstract tonal targets or patterns (e.g. McCawley, 1968; Poser, 1984; Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988; Venditti, 1995). Here we will focus on the phonological model of Japanese intonation described by the Japanese ToBI labeling scheme, which is currently the most widely used approach in psycholinguistics and phonology.