Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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Resyllabification in English: A phonetic study of word-medial /s/

영어 어중 /s/의 음성분석을 통한 영어 재음절화 연구

  • Received : 2018.11.06
  • Accepted : 2018.12.04
  • Published : 2018.12.31
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Abstract

This study aimed to show that Selkirk's concept of resyllabification offers a better analysis than Kahn's ambisyllabification to account for phonetic resyllabification. We conducted two production experiments to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the English /s/ in real words and nonce words. Ten English native speakers and six English native speakers participated in experiment 1 and experiment 2, respectively. Three acoustic cues - frication duration, center of gravity and aspiration duration of word-medial /s/ - were measured. We found that these three cues of the word-medial /s/ were realized significantly differently depending on the stresshood and openness of the preceding syllable. We preferred Selkirk's resyllabification to Kahn's ambisyllabification to explain this result because the word-medial and intervocalic /s/ behaved as the coda (as opposed to the onset) when the preceding syllable was stressed and open. The result thus suggested that two conditions must be met for the resyllabification rule to apply in English: a word-medial consonant is resyllabified only when its preceding syllable is stressed and open.

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References

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