• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.45-50
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• 2018

The vowel/consonant ratio is a well-known cue for the voicing of postvocalic consonants. This study investigates how this ratio changes as a function of speaking rate. Seven speakers of North American English read sentences containing target monosyllabic words that contrasted in coda voicing at three different speaking rates. Duration measures were taken for the voice onset time (VOT) of the onset consonant, the vowel, and the coda. The results show that the durations of the onset VOT and vowel are longer before voiced codas, and that the durations of all segments increase monotonically as speaking rate decreases. Importantly, the vowel/consonant ratio, a primary acoustic cue for coda voicing, was found to pattern asymmetrically for voiced and voiceless codas; it increases for voiced codas but decreases for voiceless codas with the decrease in speaking rate. This finding suggests that there is no stable ratio in the duration of preconsonantal vowels that is maintained in different speaking styles.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.11-16
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• 2016

This study explores the phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary to provide phoneticians and linguists with fundamental phonetic data on English word components. Entry words in the dictionary file were syllabified using an R script and examined to obtain the following results: First, English words preferred consonants to vowels in their word components. In addition, monophthongs occurred much more frequently than diphthongs. When all consonants were categorized by manner and place, the distribution indicated the frequency order of stops, fricatives, and nasals according to manner and that of alveolars, bilabials and velars according to place. These results were comparable to the results obtained from the Buckeye Corpus (Yang, 2012). Second, from the analysis of syllable structure, two-syllable words were most favored, followed by three- and one-syllable words. Of the words in the dictionary, 92.7% consisted of one, two or three syllables. This result may be related to human memory or decoding time. Third, the English words tended to exhibit discord between onset and coda consonants and between adjacent vowels. Dissimilarity between the last onset and the first coda was found in 93.3% of the syllables, while 91.6% of the adjacent vowels were different. From the results above, the author concludes that an analysis of the phonetic symbols in a dictionary may lead to a deeper understanding of English word structures and components.

• Acta Via Serica
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.85-102
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• 2018

This study aims to contrast phonological characteristics of Korean and Turkish in terms of language universality. Considering consonants, both languages have the same number of consonants (21), which is the most typologically plausible structure of consonants. Thus, it can be said that they display high universality in the number of consonants. However, Turkish shows higher universality in regards to their substance, i.e., it differs from Korean when it comes to the structure of plosives and affricates. Turkish has two contrastive consonants, i.e., voiced and voiceless. However, the Korean plosives and affricates consist of neutral, tense and aspirate voiceless. In the case of vowels, both Korean with 10 vowels and Turkish with 8 vowels show lower universality. Yet, all of those vowels belong to the list of the most plausible vowels which makes their universality higher in substance. In respect of the syllable structure, Korean with its (C)V(C) type shows a moderately complex structure while Turkish with its (C)V(C)(C) type has a complex structure. The coda may consist of two consonants in Turkish while only one consonant is possible in Korean. However, onset is composed of one consonant in both languages. The contrastive study of similarities and differences between Korean and Turkish in terms of phonological characteristics will help not only understand the two languages but also provide useful information to increase the efficacy of Korean language education for Turkish learners of Korean, whose number is rapidly increasing.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.293-314
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• 2014

This paper aims to contrast phonology of Korean and Thai in terms of language universality. Considering consonants, both languages having 21 typologically most plausible consonants display high universality in the number of consonants. However, Thai shows higher universality in regards to their substance, i.e. it differs from Korean when it comes to the structure of plosives and fricatives. Both Korean and Thai show similarities regarding the plosives due to the fact that both languages possess three contrastive consonants. However, the Thai plosives consist of plain voiced, plain voiceless and aspirated voiceless sounds that have higher universality than the Korean plosives which are plain voiced, plain voiceless and aspirated voiceless. In case of vowels, both Korean with its 10 vowels and Thai with its 9 vowels show lower universality when it comes to the total number of vowels. However, all of those vowels belong to the list of most plausible vowels which makes their universality higher in substance. In respect of syllable structure, Korean with its CVC type shows a moderately complex structure while Thai with its CCVC type has a complex structure. The coda may consist of only one consonant in each language but onset is composed of one consonant in Korean, and two consonants in Thai. The contrastive study of similarities and differences between Korean and Thai in terms of phonology will help not only understand the two languages but also provide useful information for increasing the efficacy of Korean language education for Thai learners of Korean whose number is rapidly increasing.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.72
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• pp.257-282
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• 2016

The aim of this paper is to research phonological and morphological features in Korean Voices from Berlin. The Korean Voices from Berlin was recorded in 1917 at Berlin by 5 Korean prisoners engaged in World War I, some of them came from North Hamgyeong Province, the others came from Pyeongan Province, therefore these data show a North Korean regional dialect. The data are composed of three materials, counting numbers, reciting scriptures and singing folksongs. The results of this research are as follows. 1) The consonant system of Korean voices is similar to standard Korean. The 19 consonants are classified according to 5 manners of articulations and 5 points of articulations. 2) The liquid /l/ has three allophones, [ɾ] appeared in an onset position, [l] in a word medial coda position or preceded by [l], [ɹ] in a word final coda position. 3) The vowel system of Korean voices is similar to early 20th Korean's. It has 8 monophthongs, /a, ʌ, o, u, ɯ, i, e, ${\varepsilon}$/. 4) The 1 to 10 numbers in Korean voices are similar to Middle-Korean numerals. 5) The genitive particle '/ɯi/의' is pronounced [i], [ɯ], [${\varepsilon}$], especially [ɯ] is appeared in Sino Korean. 6) The /l/-deletion of conjugations are similar to Middle-Korean, /l/ deletion always occurred, if [+cor] consonants are followed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.131-142
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• 2002

Place assimilation in Korean has been argued to reflect the consonantal strength hierarchy in which velar is stronger than labial which is in turn stronger than coronal. The strength relationship has been manifested in two ways in literature. One is through phonological representation as shown in Iverson and Lee (1994). The other is through perceptual salience ranking as suggested by Jun (1995). The goal of this study is to examine the perceptual salience of placed consonants through an identification experiment. The experiment conducted in this study reveals four facts. First, place identification of a prevocalic consonant is higher than that of a postvocalic one. Second, place identification of a stop in coda is more confusable than that of a nasal counterpart in Korean contrary to other previous studies. Third, velar is most confusable in place identification in contrast to Jun (1995) and Hume et al. (1999). Finally, place perception of consonants can vary depending on adjacent vocalic context. These results suggest that perceptual salience is one of the possibly several factors affecting a phonological process.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2020

This paper investigates the phonological processes of consonants in pronounced words in the Seoul Corpus, and compares the frequency distribution of these processes to provide a clearer understanding of conversational Korean to linguists and teachers. To this end, both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Seoul Corpus. Next, the phonological processes of consonants in the orthographic and pronounced forms were tabulated separately after syllabifying the onsets and codas, and major consonantal processes were examined. First, the results showed that the majority of the orthographic consonants' sounds were pronounced the same way as their pronounced forms. Second, more than three quarters of the onsets were pronounced as the same forms, while approximately half of the codas were pronounced as variants. Third, the majority of different onset and coda symbols were primarily caused by deletions and insertions. Finally, the five phonological process types accounted for only 12.4% of the total possible procedures. Based on these results, this paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can improve the practical understanding of spoken Korean. Future studies ought to compare the current phonological process data with those of other languages to establish universal patterns in phonological processes.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.788-791
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations. The results showed that there was a strong positional effect since the accuracy rates of the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate for the target consonants was higher in the stressed intervocalic position and initial onset position than in the unstressed intervocalic position and final coda position. Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except the unstressed intervocalic position. This is unexpected in markedness theory given that fricatives are assumed to be more difficult to learn than stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.11-20
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• 2016

It is well known that vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants than voiced ones in English, as in many other languages. Research has shown that the ratio of vowel durations in voiced and voiceless contexts in English is in the range of 0.6~0.8. However, little work has been done as to whether the ratio of vowel durations varies depending on English variety. In the production experiment in this paper, seven speakers from three varieties of English, New Zealand, British, and American English, read 30 pairs of (C)VC monosyllabic words which differ in coda voicing (e.g. beat-bead). Vowel height, phonemic vowel length, and consonant manner were varied as well. As expected, vowel-shortening effects were found in all varieties: vowels were shorter before voiceless than before voiced codas. Overall vowel duration was the longest in American English and the shortest in New Zealand (NZ) English. In particular, vowel duration before voiceless codas is the shortest in New Zealand English, indicating the most radical degree of shortening in this variety. As a result, the ratio of vowel durations in varying voicing contexts is the lowest in NZ English, while American and British English do not show a significant difference each other. In addition, consonant closure duration was examined. Whereas NZ speakers show the shortest vowel duration before a voiceless coda, their voiceless consonants have the longest closure duration, which suggest an inverse relationship between vowel duration and closure duration.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.163-174
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• 2014

Korean L2 speakers have many problems learning the pronunciation of English words. One of these problems is vowel epenthesis. Vowel epenthesis is the insertion of vowels into or between words, and Korean learners of English typically do this between successive consonants, either within clusters, or across syllables, word boundaries or following final coda consonants. The aim of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in vowel epenthesis are more closely related to the perception and production of segments (vowels and consonants) and prosody or if they are relatively independent from these processes. Subjects completed a battery of production and perception tasks. They read sentences, identified vowels and consonants, read target words likely to have epenthetic vowels (e.g., abduction) and demonstrated stress recognition and epenthetic vowel perception. The results revealed that Korean second-language learners (L2) have problems with vowel epenthesis in production and perception, but production and perception abilities were not correlated with one another. Vowel epenthesis was strongly related to vowel production and perception, suggesting that problems with segments may be combined with L1 phonotactics to produce epenthesis.