Effects of accentual fall on phrase-final vowel duration in Japanese.

This study explores the effect of accentual fall on phrase-final vowel duration in read declarative sentences of Standard Japanese. The results show that an intonational phrase-final vowel is significantly shorter when the final phrase has an accentual pitch fall than when it does not. Previous studies have reported a vowel-shortening effect for the final position of Japanese declarative sentences; the new finding reported in this paper is that this shortening effect is enhanced by the pitch fall of an accent in the sentence-final phrase.