Compression Effects of Number of Syllables on Korean Vowel

The question of Korean rhythmic type is still a controversial issue (syllable-timed; stress-timed; word-timed). As a step toward solving the question, an experiment was carried out to examine compression effects in Korean. There has been a general belief that the increase of the number of following or preceding syllables causes compression of a vowel (or syllable) in many languages, and a marked anticipatory compression effect can be especially indicative of stress timing. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to obtain some evidence to determine whether or not Korean is stress-timed. The durations of the target vowel/a/ of the monosyllabic word /pap/ were measured at both word and sentence level. In general, marked anticipatory and backward compression effects on the target vowel were observed across one-, two- and three-syllable words in citation form, whereas the effects were neither marked nor consistent at sentence level. These results led us to claim that Korean is not stress-timed.