Effects of Word Frequency on a Lenition Process: Evidence from Stop Voicing and /h/ Reduction in Korean

The present study examined whether words with higher frequency have more exposure to the lenition process such as intervocalic stop voicing or /h/ reduction in the production of the Korean speakers. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 tested if word-internal intervocalic voicing and /h/ reduction occur more often in the words with higher frequency than less frequent words respectively. Results showed that the rate of voicing was not significantly different between the high frequency group and the low frequency group; rather both high and low frequency words were shown to be fully voiced in this prosodic position. However, intervocalic /h/s were deleted more in high frequency words than in low frequency words. Low frequency words showed that other phonetic variants such as [h] and [w] were found more often than in high frequency group. Thus the results of the present study are indefinitive as to the relationship between the word frequency and lenition with the data at hand.