Tonal alignment in Japanese: A preliminary study

Takeshi Ishihara

Recent work on tone and intonation in various languages has increasingly shown a great deal of consistency in tonal alignment in various languages. I performed an experiment in order to explore the temporal alignment of the initial rise of the accentual phrase in Tokyo Japanese. In this talk, I will report the results of this experiment which provide evidence for the relevance of structural factors, demonstrated by some of the previous studies, and discuss the direction of further study on this topic based on the findings.