Phoneme Frequency of 3 to 8-year-old Korean Children

3세${\sim}$8세 아동의 자유 발화 분석을 바탕으로 한 한국어 말소리의 빈도 관련 정보

The aim of this study is to provide some information on frequencies of occurrence for units of Korean phonemes and syllables analysing spontaneous speech spoken by 3 to 8-year-old Korean children. 49 Korean Children(7${\sim}$10 children for each age) were employed as subjects for this study. Speech data were recorded and phonemically transcribed. 120 utterances for each child were selected for analysis except one child whose data were only 91 utterances. The data size of the present study were 5,971 utterances, 5,1554 syllables, and 105491 phonemes. Among 19 consonants, /n/ showed highest frequency rate of these four conson ants were over 50% for all age groups. Among 18 vowels, /a/ was the most frequent one and /i/ and / ${\wedge}$ were the second and third respectively. The frequency rate of these four consonants were over 50% for all age groups. Frequently occurring syllable types were a part of grammatical word in most cases. Only 5${\sim}$6% of syllable types covered 50% of speech.