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Phonological alternations pose challenges for models of spoken word recognition in how surface information is mapped onto stored representations in the lexicon. In the current study, an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to investigate the alternating representations of Mandarin Tone 3 in both half-third and third tone sandhi contexts. In Mandarin, a full Tone 3 (213) is reduced to an abridged tone (21) when followed by Tone 1, Tone 2, or Tone 4 (half-third tone sandhi), and Tone 3 is replaced by Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (third tone sandhi). In the half-third sandhi block, disyllabic targets with a half-third (21) or full-third (213) tone FIRST syllable and a Tone 2 (35) or Tone 4 (51) second syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. In the third tone sandhi block, third-tone sandhi disyllabic targets with a half-third or full-third SECOND syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. Results showed that both half-third and full-third primes elicited significantly faster reaction times relative to the control Tone 1 condition. The size of the facilitation was not influenced by prime condition, target frequency, targets’ first syllable tone or targets’ second syllable tone. These data suggest that Mandarin T3 may be a more abstract tone and stored as the first syllable for both types of sandhi words.

The current study examined whether or not lexical access is influenced by detailed phonological features during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. We used two types of two-character target words (Mandarin sandhi-tone and base-tone). The first characters of the words in the sandhi-tone condition had a tonal alternation, but no tonal alternation was involved in the base-tone condition. Recordings of eye movements revealed that native Mandarin Chinese readers viewed the base-tone target words more briefly than the sandhi-tone target words when they were infrequent. Such articulation-specific effects on visual word processing, however, diminished for frequent words. We suggest that a conflict in tonal representation at a character/morpheme level and at a word level induces prolongation in fixation duration on infrequent sandhi-tone words, and conclude that these tonal effects appear to reflect articulation simulation of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences.

The purpose of this study is to test the applicability of Tone Three Sandhi (T3S) when the critical syllable is a monosyllabic topic preceding a topic boundary. A recitation task from 37 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin was employed. The results from human judgements indicated that the participants predominantly produced the critical syllables with Tone 3 (T3). Additionally, the fundamental frequency of the critical syllables demonstrated a falling contour, showing that T3S was not applied. Intonation break-ups and the prolongation of the critical syllables lent strong support to the view that the topic syllable was at an intonation/phonological phrase-final position. The findings can be elegantly accommodated by constraint-based analyses, which propose that T3S must be avoided when two T3 syllables are separated by an intonation/phonological phrase boundary. Issues relating to pauses, speech rates and word frequency effects are also discussed.

This review is based on the roundtable conference promoted by professors Carmen Matzenauer, Luciani Tenani and Christina Abreu Gomes and coordinated by professor Jose Magalhaes, aiming to discuss various perspectives in the field of phonology, in honor of the outstanding linguist Leda Bisol. A lecture given by Carmen Matzenauer on Generative Phonology and its main assumptions (e.g. levels of representation, rules and features) initiates the roundtable conference, in which she presents language acquisition data and discusses some ramifications of Generative Phonology, specifically Nonlinear Phonology. Furthermore, Luciani Tenani presents interesting examples concerning vocalic sandhi in Brazilian Portuguese based on assumptions derived from Prosodic Phonology located in the domains of Generative Phonology. Eventually, Christina Abreu Gomes discusses Exemplar-based models applied to phonological theory, referencing the continuity between lexicon and grammar proposed by these models as well as presenting effects of type and token frequencies in the use of language.

Introduction: Ankylosing Spodylitis1 is a chronic inflammatory disorder that primarily involves the sacro iliac joint of the lumbar region. It is characterized by musculo skeletal pain, stiffness and immobility of spine and is one of the most common disease of the spine. Meeting place of two bones are known as San-dhi2,3. Total eight types of Sandhis4 are explained by Acharya Sushruta according to their shape and their movement. KORA, Ulukala, Samudga, Pratara, Tunnasevani, Vayasatunda, Mandala and Sankhavarta. Pratara Sandhi5 can be compared to joints of vertebral column and these joints are also considered in the context of Alpachala Sandhi6. Methods: The main objective of this study is aimed at Comprehensive Study and Conceptual Study on Kati Trika Prushtavamsha Sandi Shareera as mentioned in the Classics, Study the Structural Abnormalities of the Anatomy of Vertebral Column in Lumbar Ankylosing Spondylitis and to compare the Normal Radio-logical Structure of Lumbo Sacral Region with the Confirmed 30 cases of Lumbar Ankylosing Spondylitis. Results: All the Patients were observed before treatment by Objective and Subjective Criteria. Conclusion: As per the Study, Lumbar Ankylosing Spondylitis is more prone in young men than young women and lack of Spinal mobility with occupation has major role in this disease.

This article explores in depth various sandhi (joining) rules in Kerala’s Malayalam language, which play a vital role in framing of the inflected and agglutinated forms of words and their compounds. It discusses significant progress in a scientific method to generate a specific annotated data set of Malayalam words that would be useful in many Natural Language Processing tasks which involve Malayalam preprocessing. The article discusses the results and issues encountered in developing this word-splitting tool for Malayalam, mainly in the context of improving the alignments between parallel texts that form a core resource in the Machine Translation task.

Przedmiotem niniejszego artykułu jest sandhi w języku czeskim, analiza zjawiska oparta na materiale wyekscerpowanym z czeskiego korpusu języka mówionego ORTOFON. Norma literackiego języka czeskiego na granicy międzywyrazowej dopuszcza wyłącznie realizację bezdźwięcznego wygłosowego obstruentu przed nagłosowym sonantem. Przeprowadzone badania pokazują, że w języku czeskim dochodzi do częstych odstępstw od istniejącej normy literackiej. Na granicy międzywyrazowej rejestruje się wymówienia z udźwięczniającą spółgłoską w wygłosie przed nagłosowym sonantem. Odstępstwo od normy jest bardzo wysokie.

This study is the first comprehensive acoustic study to examine the acquisition of two Mandarin tone sandhi rules: the third tone sandhi and the more phonetically motivated, half-third sandhi rule by both tonal (Cantonese) and non-tonal (American English) speakers using a Wug Test. Participants were asked to form disyllables from two monosyllabic morphemes. To test for the operation of the lexical versus the computation mechanisms in sandhi rule application, both real and various types of wug (nonsense) morphemes were included. Functional data analysis revealed that Cantonese and American speakers apply the two rules similarly on both real words and wug words, suggesting that the sandhi forms are stored as part of the representation of the abstract Tone 3 (T3) category, and computation of allophonic variants is likely to be involved during production. However, in their computation of tone sandhi rules, L2 learners showed less detailed and less accurate production of tonal contours compared to native speakers, due, perhaps, to less detailed phonological representations of allophonic variants. In general, Cantonese speakers performed better than American speakers. Perceptual mapping between Mandarin sandhi T3 to existing Cantonese tone categories may be responsible for the observed pitch contours among Cantonese speakers. Finally, no phonetic bias was found in the application of the two sandhi rules among these groups of L2 learners, which is likely due to more variability in L2’s speech, obscuring any differences that may exist.

Disyllabic verb-noun (V-N) items in Shanghai Wu have variable surface tone patterns: They can undergo either a rightward extension tone sandhi, which extends the lexical tone of the first syllable over the entire word, or tonal reduction on the first syllable. The current study investigates how the phonological properties of these alternation processes as well as variation influence how Shanghai speakers represent and access such words. We conducted an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment on Shanghai V-N items that can undergo either tonal extension or tonal reduction with native Shanghai speakers. Each disyllabic target was preceded by monosyllabic primes with the canonical tone, the tonal-extension tone, the surface tone, or a tone unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the targets. Results showed both canonical and tonal-extension priming effects, but no surface priming effect. Moreover, although more familiar V-Ns were recognized with shorter reaction time, the priming effect did not interact with speakers’ familiarity ratings or sandhi preference ratings of the targets. These data are consistent with the interpretation that both the canonical and tonal-extension forms are represented in Shanghai speakers’ mental lexicon due to tone sandhi variation, but the representation does not seem to be modulated by the frequencies of the variants. Also, together with findings from auditory priming studies of other tone sandhi patterns, the current study suggests that certain phonological properties of an alternation, such as its locality and transparency, influence the representation of words undergoing the alternation; but whether the alternation is structure-preserving does not seem to impact the representation.

Mandarin tone 3 sandhi is a phonological alternation in which the initial tone 3 (i.e., low tone) syllable changes to a tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) when followed by another tone 3. The present study used across-modal syllable-morpheme matchingexperiment to examine how native speakers process the sandhi sequences derived from verb reduplication and compounding, respectively. Embedded in a visually-presented sentential context, a disyllabic sequence containing a sandhi target was displayed simultaneously with a monosyllabic audio, either a tone 1 (i.e., high-level tone), tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) or tone 3 (i.e., low tone), and participants judged whether the audio syllable matched the visual morpheme. Results showed that the tone 3 sandhi was processed differently in the two constructions. The underlying tone and the surface tone were co-activated and competed with each other in sandhi compounds whereas predominant activation of the underlying tone, over the surface tone, was observed in reduplication. The processing of tone 3 sandhi offers support for distinctive morphological structures: a lexical compound is represented both as a whole-word unit and as a combination of two individual morphemes whereas a verb reduplication is represented and accessed as a monomorphemic unit in the mental lexicon.

This poster investigated the mental representation of tone sandhi words (words that undergo tonal alternation) in Kunming Chinese. Auditory-auditory priming lexical decision task was conducted to examine whether the surface forms or the underlying forms of the sandhi words were stored in the mental lexicon and accessed during spoken word recognition. Results showed that the surface forms of T1 and T3 sandhi words were stored episodically in the mental lexicon. Although tone 1 sandhi and tone 3 sandhi rules differ in opacity, they were stored similarly, casting doubts on the role of opacity in determining the representation of sandhi patterns.

This paper provides a corpus-based study of agreement with post-nominal adjectives in coordinate nominal expressions with only one determiner in European Portuguese (EP). It aims to provide clues to understand the patterns of agreement that contradict the predictions of our previous studies in which we made a distinction between two constructions corresponding to the same categorial linear outputs: (a) those associated with the reference of only one entity and (b) those in which nouns are used to refer distinct entities. Since it was suggested by those previous studies the existence of parallel patterns of agreement between Spanish and EP in these types of constructions, we aim to provide a preliminary comparative study that allow us to explore this possibility, namely in what concerns the closest conjunct agreement in both gender and number (considering the different behaviors of the values of these features). Finally, we aim to evaluate the adequacy of some proposals presented for Spanish to explain the EP data, contributing to the description of these structures and presenting some clues for further investigation.

Este trabalho investiga os contextos em que ocorrem processos de sândi vocálico externo em Lung’Ie, uma língua crioula de base portuguesa falada na Príncipe Island, São Tomé e Príncipe, e sua relação com o sistema suprassegmental da língua. Através da análise da relação entre acento e tom nos processos de sândi, esta pesquisa pretende demonstrar que o padrão tonal do Lung’Ie, tal como descrito por Maurer (2009), não bloqueia o fenômeno, que é bloqueado em determinados contextos de acento. A contribuição desta pesquisa envolve a compreensão do sistema suprassegmental do Lung’Ie e da relação das categorias de tom e acento na língua.

Objective: To obtain an application for iPhone mobile to identify and correct the spelling mistakes in the given Tamil text and post it in the social media. Methods: The application splits each Tamil word from the given Tamil text and further analysed by using Tamil dictionary. Each word is split morphologically and finally checked for its sandhi errors based on Tamil grammar rules. Findings: Currently, Tamil spell check application is not available for iPhone in app store. So, this will be first application for identifying misspellings in Tamil text. Applications/Improvements: This Tamil spell checker application can be improved by adding grammar rules for other languages too. Keywords: iPhone, Tamil Spell Checker, NLP

In Luganda (Bantu, Uganda), a sequence of vowels in successive syllables (V.V) is not allowed. If the first vowel is high, the two vowels are joined together in a diphthong (e.g., i + a → i͜a). If the first vowel is non-high, it is deleted with compensatory lengthening of the second vowel in the sequence (e.g., e + a → aː). This paper presents an acoustic investigation of inter-word V#V sequences in Luganda. It was found that the vowel interval in V#V sequences is longer than that in V#C sequences. When the first vowel in V#V is non-high, the formant frequency of the outcome is determined by the second vowel in the sequence. When the first vowel is high, on the other hand, the sequence is realized as a diphthong, with the transition between the two formant patterns taking up most of the duration. The durational patterns within these diphthongs provide evidence against the transcription-based claim that these sequences are reorganized so that the length lies in the second vowel (/i#V/ → [jVː]). The findings bring into question a canonical case of compensatory lengthening conditioned by glide formation.

This study compared the f0, duration and intensity patterns of disyllabic groups that undergo left- or right-dominant tone sandhi in Shanghai Chinese. We investigated the effects of contrastive focus and speech rate on these patterns, in order to further our understanding of the nature of left-/right-dominant sandhi and the phonetic realization mechanisms of focus encoding and speech rate. The results suggest that [Verb+Noun] phrases undergo right-dominant sandhi, which involves a phonetic reduction of the non-final tone as the f0 contour of σ1 is fully realized in focused or slow speech condition; [Adj.+Noun] compounds undergo left-dominant sandhi, which consists phonologically of rightward tone spread, since the f0 pattern of compounds is preserved in all conditions. The focus-induced adjustment patterns of f0, duration and intensity show that left-/right-dominant sandhi domains are composed of different prosodic structures and focus is indirectly encoded via prosodic structure. Although slow speech and focus both enhance the f0 realization, they are realized by way of different mechanisms. Focus is realized via a speaker's direct control of the intensity, while speech rate is realized via a speaker's intentional control of the duration, and the f0 adjustment is better regarded as the surface realization or byproduct of these adjustments.

Morphemes involved in the formation of Somali verbs and nouns are, in most instances, clearly individuated into categories corresponding to their role in word formation. Verbs contain a base, derivational extensions, inflectional affixes, and clitics that attach in a fixed order. Nouns also contain a base and derivational affixes, but little inflectional morphology. Indeed, both parts of speech have similar morphological templates in Somali, but the relationship between the language’s morphological domains and prosodic domains has only recently become a subject of detailed inquiry. We add to this ongoing trend by illustrating in this paper that there are close correlations between these domains in the language’s verbal and nominal systems that can be elucidated by morphophonological processes; certain processes occur only in a particular prosodic domain, and these process/domain combinations are similar in both the nominal and verbal systems. By establishing diagnostic phenomena attributable to phrase-level domains, this paper fills a gap between recent works focused only on defining prosodic characteristics of Somali words (Downing & Nilsson 2017; Green & Morrison 2016) and the accentual behavior of Somali clauses (Le Gac 2002, 2003a, b).

Despite various work which aimed to identify the phonetic and structural underpinning of tone sandhi directionality, the underlying mechanism that governs tone sandhi remains unknown. We note that the two widely discussed properties of tone sandhi, their phonetic grounds and directionality, correspond to two types of cognitive biases widely investigated in segmental phonology, namely substantive bias and structural bias respectively. This study examines structural simplicity and phonetic naturalness of tone sandhi patterns across seventeen Chinese varieties. Based on a structure-based analysis, we show that tone sandhi patterns are overwhelmingly uni-directional (i.e. structurally simple) either throughout a sandhi system or within each grammatical category. Crucially, uni-directionality is largely right-dominant, which could be attributed to its phonetic grounding. We argue that structural simplicity grounded on phonetic substance better captures tone sandhi asymmetries and such phonetically-grounded structural simplicity bias is reflected in the asymmetries of Chinese tone sandhi directionality.

In Mandarin, a left-/right-branching asymmetry is observed when the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) process interacts with the syntactic structure of an expression: while expressions that have a left-branching syntactic structure only have a non-alternating sandhi pattern in which all but the rightmost T3 is changed to the sandhi tone, for expressions that have a right-branching syntactic structure various sandhi patterns are possible. This paper proposes that T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on a prosodic structure matched from the syntactic structure of an expression, along the lines of the Match Theory of syntactic-prosodic constituency correspondence (Selkirk 2011). The interaction of Match Phrase constraints and Strong Strong Start, which is a more restricted version of Selkirk’s (2011) Strong Start constraint, predicts that different prosodic structures are possible outputs for a right-branching expression, while for a left-branching expression the only possible output is a left-branching prosodic structure. The various possible sandhi patterns for a right-branching expression and the non-alternating sandhi pattern for a left-branching expression are derived when T3S applies cyclically bottom-up on the proposed prosodic structures.

The current study provides additional phonetic data for the light-initial sandhi patterns in Suzhou Chinese, illustrating a context-sensitive pitch alternation that is not present after heavy-initial forms, and has not been attested in other neighboring Northern Wu varieties either. I propose that such pitch alternation is due to interpolation effects on toneless prosodic constituents, here toneless moras. A binary trochee built directly on moras yields an unparsed (i.e. toneless) final mora in light-heavy disyllables, accounting for the pitch patterns on the surface. Such an analysis is not only empirically adequate, but also echoes the cross-linguistic structural observation that a foot head lighter in weight than the dependent is generally dispreferred (Head-Dependent Asymmetry; cf. Dresher and van der Hulst 1998).

This study aims to increase our knowledge about tone realiza- tion in disyllabic words in continuous Mandarin speech. Au- tomatic alignments of large speech corpora were carried out to enable the study of potential tone variants, with a special focus on variation factors such as prosodic position and right tonal context. The alignments without tone variants (V0, phono- logical representation) show that Tone 4 is more frequent in phrase-final position than in other prosodic positions, support- ing the "declination line" pattern often observed in speech pro- duction. Tone 4 is also the most frequent lexical tone (>50%) in all prosodic positions. Alignments permitting tone variants (V1, phonetic realization) show an increase of Tone 1 in phrase- initial position, compared to V0. Tone realization is observed to be related not only to the prosodic position, but also to the within-word right tonal context. Unsurprisingly, the most no- table change in tone realization happens for Tone 3 in the first syllable of disyllabic words when followed by another Tone 3 because of the well-known "tone sandhi rule" in which T3T3 disyllabic words become T2T3. Cross-word right tonal context is found to impact only Tone 3. However, the results in this study show that Tone 3 sandhi rule is more a tendency than an absolute rule.; International audience; This study aims to increase our knowledge about tone realization in disyllabic words in continuous Mandarin speech. Automatic alignments of large speech corpora were carried out to enable the study of potential tone variants, with a special focus on variation factors such as prosodic position and right tonal context. The alignments without tone variants (V0, phonological representation) show that Tone 4 is more frequent in phrase-final position than in other prosodic positions, supporting the "declination line" pattern often observed in speech production. Tone 4 is also the most frequent lexical tone (>50%) in all prosodic positions. Alignments permitting tone variants (V1, phonetic realization) show an increase of Tone 1 in phraseinitial position, compared to V0. Tone realization is observed to be related not only to the prosodic position, but also to the within-word right tonal context. Unsurprisingly, the most notable change in tone realization happens for Tone 3 in the first syllable of disyllabic words when followed by another Tone 3 because of the well-known "tone sandhi rule" in which T3T3 disyllabic words become T2T3. Crossword right tonal context is found to impact only Tone 3. However, the results in this study show that Tone 3 sandhi rule is more a tendency than an absolute rule.

Many studies have found that native Mandarin speakers produce T3 sandhi in a non-neutralized way, with the sandhi tone not fully merged into its sandhi target. This makes it interesting to investigate whether advanced learners of Mandarin will produce T3 sandhi in a similar or different way as well as reasons underlying it. Results from this carefully controlled experimental study show that advanced Korean learners of Mandarin produce T3 sandhi in a neutralized way, in contrast to non-neutralized production by native Mandarin speakers. This is probably due to Korean speakers’ learning of the explicit T3 sandhi rule in their L2 learning program, as compared to the implicit learning of the T3 sandhi rule by Mandarin speakers. Though Korean speakers produce T3 sandhi in a neutralized way, their production of sandhi T3 is found to be overall flatter in f0 curve than that of native Mandarin speakers; this is consistent with their production of Mandarin lexical T2, the base tone of the sandhi target T2. This finding suggests that these advanced L2 learners’ sandhi production is restrained by the way they produce Mandarin lexical tones.

This paper describes neural network based approaches to the process of the formation and splitting of word-compounding, respectively known as the Sandhi and Vichchhed, in Sanskrit language. Sandhi is an important idea essential to morphological analysis of Sanskrit texts. Sandhi leads to word transformations at word boundaries. The rules of Sandhi formation are well defined but complex, sometimes optional and in some cases, require knowledge about the nature of the words being compounded. Sandhi split or Vichchhed is an even more difficult task given its non uniqueness and context dependence. In this work, we propose the route of formulating the problem as a sequence to sequence prediction task, using modern deep learning techniques. Being the first fully data driven technique, we demonstrate that our model has an accuracy better than the existing methods on multiple standard datasets, despite not using any additional lexical or morphological resources. The code is being made available at https://github.com/IITD-DataScience/Sandhi_Prakarana

La liaison française est la réalisation de la consonne finale d’un mot 1 (aussi appelé « mot lieur ») derrière un mot 2 (aussi appelé « mot lié ») à initiale vocalique. Même dans ce qui est considéré comme le français standard, nous pouvons constater une variation diverse d’utilisations de la liaison et de réalisations des consonnes finales. Pour comprendre la liaison française, il est nécessaire d’étudier leurs aspects phonologiques et morphosyntaxiques, ainsi que les facteurs externes qui la favorisent. La liaison française étant un phénomène de sandhi externe complexe, j’ai trouvé pertinent d’étudier le phénomène de sandhi interne japonais qu’est le Rendaku, afin de comparer leurs aspects morphosyntaxiques et phonologiques, et d’en trouver les équivalences et les différences.

Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward in a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by a phonologically nasal consonant or stressed nasal vowel and does not affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive nasalization affects morpheme-initial voiceless stops across a morpheme boundary. Many forms that include a causative prefix show this kind of progressive nasalization. However, this nasal spread lacks any obvious nasal trigger and does not occur consistently. In this paper, I propose an explanation of these cases as vestiges of earlier phonological rules from pre-Proto-Tupi-Guarani but not active in Paraguayan Guarani, followed by the emergence of a regressive oralization rule and ending in a reanalysis of the basic form of the causative prefix. In so doing, I will provide a revised sequence of changes involving contour allophones in the reconstruction of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG).

Computational Linguistic refers to the development of the computer systems that deal with human languages. In this paper, different Computational Linguistic Techniques such as Parts of Speech (POS) tagger, ‘Sandhi’ Splitter, ‘Alankaar’ Finder and ‘Samaas’ Finder were considered. After a thorough literature review, it was found that fifteen techniques were used for POS tagging, nine techniques were used for ‘Sandhi’ splitting, one work is done for ‘Alankaar’ finder and absolutely no techniques are available for ‘Samaas’ finder for the Indo-Aryan as well as Dravidian languages. Analysis shows that Rule Based Approach (RBA) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) are frequently used for POS tagging, RBA is most frequently used for ‘Sandhi’ Splitter, the general Human Intelligence (HI) is used for ‘Alankaar’ Finder and no ‘Samaas’ finder technique is available for any Indian language.

Tone 3 (T3) in Mandarin is one of the most difficult tones for second-language (L2) learners given its variants in different contexts. While previous studies investigated L2 learners’ acquisition of T3 in the sandhi context, it remains unclear how L2 learners’ learning experience modulates their phonological knowledge of T3 sandhi in producing different types of words. This study used a wug production test to investigate the effect of Mandarin learning experience on the production of the sandhi form (a rising tone) by experienced and inexperienced Korean-speaking learners. The acoustic analyses showed that experienced Korean-speaking L2 learners were better at using their phonological knowledge of T3 sandhi than less experienced learners when producing pseudo and novel words, but not real Chinese words. The experienced learners had higher pitch values and a steeper rising slope for the T3 sandhi form of pseudo words, and higher pitch values for that of novel words, than the inexperienced learners. The findings suggested that learners’ increased experience with Mandarin facilitated their use of the phonological knowledge of T3 sandhi. Given learners’ difficulties with the T3 sandhi rule, language teachers are suggested to develop teaching materials with different word types to promote the generalization of the rule.

In recent years, Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis methods have been actively researched. We need to estimate appropriate prosodic information for generating a high-quality synthetic speech. However, manual annotation is costly, and automatic annotation introduces estimation errors. This paper examines the integration of accent sandhi and prosodic feature estimation in the acoustic modeling for Japanese TTS to overcome the problems. The proposed method achieves total optimization of the F0 model by using the linguistic features from a dictionary. Objective and subjective evaluations confirmed that the cost of creating accent labels was reduced, and the accuracy of the prosodic feature estimation was improved.