The study examines to what extent intonation, signalling a sentence’s communicative function, can interfere with the realization of lexical accent, focusing on the F0 peak, which can be associated with it. Standard Sofia Bulgarian (SB) and Standard Tokyo Japanese (SJ) were selected as languages that are known for having lexical accent, realized partially (SB) or exclusively (SJ) through pitch contour.

Production by two respective pairs of female speakers of SB and SJ was examined. One-word statements and incredulous interrogative utterances were analysed in terms of their F0 contour.

Statements were elicited by reading out aloud of target words, allowing for sufficient pauses between them. Incredulous interrogatives were produced by the participants in response to statements uttered by the researcher, after they had been instructed to pronounce them as if they required confirmation of unlikely points in the statements.

Meaningful words, containing two or three syllables with a lexical stress on each respective one, were selected as targets, making up for five items per language. Non-accented Japanese tokens were not included.

Analysis of F0 contour showed that in SJ interrogative intonation does not interfere significantly with the position of a non-final peak, associated with lexical accent, while in SB it tends to shift it toward the utterance’s end. It appears that in SJ interrogative sentences are phonetically manifested through boundary tone alone, while in SB the utterance’s communicative function can affect the tonal mapping of word-accent as well.