Browse > Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2015.7.2.119

On the Merger of Korean Mid Front Vowels: Phonetic and Phonological Evidence  

Eychenne, Julien (Hankuk Univ.)
Jang, Tae-Yeoub (Hankuk Univ.)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.7, no.2, 2015 , pp. 119-129 More about this Journal
Abstract
This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.
Keywords
mid front vowels; merger; Korean monophthongs; functional load;
Citations & Related Records
연도 인용수 순위
  • Reference
1 Ahn, S. & Iverson, G. K. (2007). Structured imbalances in the emergence of Korean vowel system. In Joseph C. Salmons & Shannon Dubenion-Smith (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2005 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 284), 275-293, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
2 Ahn, S. (2002). A dispersion account on Middle Korean Vowel Shifts, Japanese/Korean Linguistics. Vol. 10, 237-250.
3 Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J. & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items, Journal of Memory and Language. Vol. 59, 390-412.   DOI
4 Bae, J. (1996). Introduction to Korean Phonology. Seoul: Shingu Munhwasa. (in Korean)
5 Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.66, http://www.praat.org.
6 Chladkova, K. & Escudero, P. (2012). Comparing vowel perception and production in Spanish and Portuguese: European versus Latin American dialects, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Vol. 131, No. 2, 119-125.   DOI
7 Cox, F. & Palethorpe, S. (2007). Australian English, Journal of International Phonetic Association. Vol. 37, No. 3, 341-350.
8 Glasberg, B. R. & Moore, B. C. J. (1990). Derivation of auditory filter shapes from notched-noise data, Hearing Research. Vol. 47, 103-138.   DOI
9 Hansen, A. B. & Juillard, C. (2011). La phonologie parisienne a trente ans d'intervalle-Les voyelles a double timbre, Journal of French Language Studies. Vol. 21, No. 3, 313-359.   DOI
10 Hockett, C. F. (1955). A Manual of Phonology. Baltimore: Waverly Press.
11 Huh, W. (1952). ay, ey, oy, ɔ uy umka ("on the sound quality of ay, ey, oy, o, ɔ"), Kukeo Kukmunhak, Vol. 1, 5-8. (in Korean)
12 Huh, W. (1991). Korean Phonology. Seoul: Sam Munhwasa. (in Korean).
13 Hwang, H. & Moon, S. (2005). An acoustic comparative study of Korean /에, 애/ and English /${\epsilon}$, ae/ pronounced by Korean young male speakers, Malsori. Vol. 56, 29-47. (in Korean)
14 Johnson, K. (2005). Speaker normalization in speech perception. In D. B. Pisoni & R. Remez (eds.), The Handbook of Speech Perception, 363-389, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
15 Kim, H. (2006). Korean national corpus in the 21st century Sejong project. In Proceedings of the13th National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) International Symposium, 49-54.
16 Kim, M. (1992). Korean Phonology. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Co. (in Korean)
17 Kriengwatana, B., Escudero, P. & Terry, J. (2014). Listeners cope with speaker and accent variation differently: Evidence from the Go/No-go task. In Proceedings of the 15th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 2-5 December 2014, Christchurch, 76-79.
18 Mannell, R. (2004). Perceptual vowel space for Australian English lax vowels: 1988 and 2004. In Proceedings of the 10th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology, Sydney, 221-226.
19 Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 2: Social Factors. Malden: Blackwell.
20 Lee, H. (1996). Korean Phonetics. Seoul: Taehaksa. (in Korean)
21 Martinet, A. (2005 [1955]). Economie des changements phonetiques. Traite de phonologie diachronique. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
22 Moon, S. (2007). A fundamental phonetic investigation of Korean Monophongs, Journal of the Korean Society of Phonetic Sciences and Speech Technology. Vol. 62, 1-17.
23 Moore, B. C. J. (2013). Aspects of auditory processing related to speech perception, In W. J. Hardcastle, J. Laver & F. E. Gibbon (eds), The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences, 2nd ed., West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 454-488.
24 Oh, Y., Pellegrino, F., Coupe, C. & Marsico, E. (2013). Cross-language comparison of functional load for vowels, consonants, and tones. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France, 25-29.
25 Pepiot, E. (2013). Voice, speech and gender: male-female acoustic differences and cross-language variation in English and French speakers. XVemes Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs de l'ED 268, Jun 2012, Paris, France.
26 Pinheiro, J. C. & Bates, D. M. (2000). Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-PLUS. New York: Springer.
27 Rosner, B. S. and Pickering, J. B. (1994). Vowel Perception and Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28 Shin, J., Kiaer, J. & Cha, J. (2013). The Sounds of Korean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29 Seong, C. (2004). An acoustic analysis on the Korean 8 monophthongs with respect to the acoustic variables on the F1/F2 vowel space, Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea. Vol. 23, No. 6, 454-461.
30 Shin, J. (2000). Understanding Spoken Language. Seoul: Hankuk Munhwasa. (in Korean)
31 Sohn, H. (1999). The Korean Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (in Korean)
32 Surendran, D., & Niyogi, P. (2006). Quantifying the functional load of phonemic oppositions, distinctive features, and suprasegmentals. In O. N. Thomsen (ed.), Competing Models of Linguistic Change: Evolution and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 43-58.
33 Yang, B. (1992). An acoustical study of Korean monophthongs produced by male and female speakers, Journal of Acoustical Society of America. Vol. 91, No. 4, 2280-2283.   DOI
34 Yang, B. (1996). A comparative study of American English and Korean vowels produced by male and female speakers, Journal of Phonetics. Vol. 24, 245-261.   DOI   ScienceOn
35 Yeon, J. (2012). Korean dialects: a general survey. In N. Tranter (ed.), The Languages of Japan and Korea. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 168-185.