Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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Overlapping of /o/ and /u/ in modern Seoul Korean: focusing on speech rate in read speech

  • Igeta, Takako (Sophia University, Faculty of Science and Technology) ;
  • Hiroya, Sadao (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation) ;
  • Arai, Takayuki (Faculty of Science and Technology, Sophia University)
  • Received : 2016.09.30
  • Accepted : 2017.03.08
  • Published : 2017.03.31
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Abstract

Previous studies have reported on the overlapping of $F_1$ and $F_2$ distribution for the vowels /o/ and /u/ produced by young Korean speakers of the Seoul dialect. It has been suggested that the overlapping of /o/ and /u/ occurs due to sound change. However, few studies have examined whether speech rate influences the overlapping of /o/ and /u/. On the other hand, previous studies have reported that the overlapping of /o/ and /u/ in syllable produced by male speakers is smaller than by female speakers. Few reports have investigated on the overlapping of the two vowels in read speech produced by male speakers. In the current study, we examined whether speech rates affect overlapping of /o/ and /u/ in read speech by male and female speakers. Read speech produced by twelve young adult native speakers of Seoul dialect were recorded in three speech rates. For female speakers, discriminant analysis showed that the discriminant rate became lower as the speech rate increases from slow to fast. Thus, this indicates that speech rate is one of the factors affecting the overlapping of /o/ and /u/. For male speakers, on the other hand, the discriminant rate was not correlated with speech rate, but the overlapping was larger than that of female speakers in read speech. Moreover, read speech by male speakers was less clear than by female speakers. This indicates that the overlapping may be related to unclear speech by sociolinguistic reasons for male speakers.

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References

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