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     Prosodic features of Japanese ‘women’s language’ include prolonged sentence ending, wider pitch range and final rising pitch contour, especially on sentence-final particles (Eda 2000), although men often use feminine features (Okamoto, 1995).  Crucially, speakers construct their identity by drawing linguistic resources available to the community (Cameron & Kulick 2003), and Hiramoto & Wong (2004) investigated prosodic features in performance by both men and women to illustrate the ideology of Japanese ‘men’s/women’s language.’  However, there is no study on the relationship between a speaker’s working experience and gender performance to investigate two common beliefs: men’s/women’s language distinction is developed during working experiences (Kawanari 1993), and speakers’ perception of men’s/women’s language influences their gender performance.  This study aims to fill the gap in the study by focusing on intonational features at sentence endings to examine what prosodic features Japanese speakers use to differentiate masculine and feminine styles (hereafter STYLES), and how their choice of intonational cues relates to the language-external factors. 

     The data for this study are the recordings of sentence readings by ten male and ten female Japanese native speakers with Tokyo dialect.  Each speaker plays both gender roles in the casual setting.  The two sentences for the reading task end in the gender-neutral sentence-final serial particle yo.ne, and each sentence is repeated twice. 

     Each gender performance by a speaker is compared, focusing on the yo.ne segment.  Eight speakers made distinction between STYLES in both two sentences, and seven did in only one sentence.  Men made more distinction between STYLES than women (P=.0374).  Women with working experience made more distinction in STYLES (P=.0085), while men do not have the same pattern.  Thus, it partially confirms previous claims. 

     Scoring system for each linguistic factor is introduced in order to gauge if a participant’s performance matches expected results from previous researches.  Since longer yo.ne in feminine performance is expected, each speaker’s yo.ne duraiton in both STYLES are compared for each sentence.  When a speaker performed longer yo.ne in portion for his/her feminine style of a sentence in average, the performance for the sentence receives one point.  Similarly, wider range in feminine performance and final rising pitch contour (higher than 30 Hz) receive one point for each.  The result indicates that women with working experience utilized final rising contour more than women without working experience (P=0.0133).

     Two language attitude criteria emerged from follow-up interviews: (1) whether a speaker believes that ‘men’s language’ and ‘women’s language’ differ in current Japanese language use, and (2) whether the speaker wants to see a ‘men’s/women’s language’ distinction in the future.  Statistical analysis shows that it is women that are influenced significantly by two criteria of language attitudes (P=.0234 and P=.0315 respectively).