Influence of prosody, context, and word order in the identification of focus in Japanese dialogue

This paper studies the influence of prosodic features, context, and word order on the identification of focused clauses in Japanese dialogue, using a psychoacoustic experiment. In the experiment, question and answer speech was used as stimuli. The questions were to create two different contexts in the stimuli, and the answers had focal prominence at different clauses and had different word orders. The experimental results indicate that (1) prosodic characteristics are more significant for focus identification, (2) context has some effect on identification, and (3) it is probable that the word order has some effect on identification.