A study on pitch patterns of Japanese speakers of English in comparison with native speakers of English

We describe the analytical results for pitch patterns of sentence utterances in English spoken by Japanese (Japanese English, henceforth). In this study, the difference between Japanese English and native English speakers is evaluated in terms of sentence structure to classify words depending on their positions and functions. Results suggest that the intonation patterns in Japanese English are flat, such that most function words are high pitch at any position in a sentence, whereas content words are low pitch at the beginning of sentences and at the ends of interrogative sentences, but high pitch at the ends of declarative sentences.