Japanese ToBI
(aka. X-JToBI, formerly J_ToBI)
Japanese ToBI was born of the experimental and theoretical research on Japanese tone structure by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert in the 1980s. The J_ToBI labeling conventions were formalized by Jennifer Venditti in 1995 and were further described in Sun-Ah Jun’s 2005 edited book on prosodic typology and ToBI systems. This framework has recently been extended by Kikuo Maekawa and colleagues to fully cover spontaneous speech, and is now known as X-JToBI (‘extended’ Japanese ToBI). The X-JToBI scheme has been used to annotate over 45 hours of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (see CSJ info in English and Japanese).
Relevant references in the development of the X-JToBI model:
2007 Venditti, Jennifer J., Kikuo Maekawa and Mary E. Beckman. In press. Prominence marking in the Japanese intonation system. In Shigeru Miyagawa and Mamoru Saito (eds.) Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
2006 Igarashi, Yosuke, Hideaki Kikuchi and Kikuo Maekawa. 2006. Inritsu joohoo [Prosodic information]. In Nihongo hanashi kotoba koopasu no koochikuhoo [Construction of The Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ)], Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyuujo [National Institute for Japanese Language (NIJL, formerly NRLI)] Report 124, pp. 347-453.
2005 Venditti, Jennifer J. 2005. The J_ToBI model of Japanese intonation. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, pp. 172-200.
2004 Maekawa, Kikuo, Yosuke Igarashi, Hideaki Kikuchi and Kiyoko Yoneyama. 2004. Nihongo hanashi kotoba koopasu no intoneeshon laberuingu [Intonation labeling of The Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (CSJ)]. Unpublished manuscript, Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyuujo [National Institute for Japanese Language (NIJL, formerly NRLI)]. [20 pp.]
2003 Maekawa, Kikuo. 2003. Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese: Its design and evaluation. In Proceedings of the ISCA and IEEE Workshop on Spontaneous Speech Processing and Recognition (SSPR2003), pp. 7-12. Tokyo, Japan.
2002 Maekawa, Kikuo, Hideaki Kikuchi, Yosuke Igarashi and Jennifer J. Venditti. 2002. X-JToBI: An extended J_ToBI for spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the Interntional Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), pp. 1545-1548. Denver, Colorado.
1997 Venditti, Jennifer J. 1997. Japanese ToBI Labelling Guidelines. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 50: 127-162. [Identical to the 1995 unpublished manuscript.]
1995 Venditti, Jennifer J. 1995. Japanese ToBI labelling guidelines. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University. [Original Japanese ToBI guide.]
1995 Venditti, Jennifer J. 1995. Japanese ToBI labelling guidelines. Unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University. [Original Japanese ToBI guide.]
Download the .wav sound files and .TextGrid label files of the example utterances (2MB) and practice utterances (1MB) contained in the original 1995 Guide. Use the Praat speech analysis free software to view the files.
1988 Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Mary E. Beckman. 1988. Japanese Tone Structure. MIT Press.
1986 Beckman, Mary E. and Janet B. Pierrehumbert. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3: 255-309.