• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.29-40
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• 2019

The paper investigates the minimal pair of Korean phonemes quantitatively. To achieve this goal, I calculated the number of consonant minimal pairs in the syllable-initial position as both raw counts and relative counts, and analyzed the part of speech relations of the two words in the minimal pair. "Urimalsaem" was chosen as the object of this study because it was judged that the minimal pair analysis should be done through a dictionary and it is the largest among Korean dictionaries. The results of the study are summarized as follows. First, there were 153 types of minimal pairs out of 337,135 examples. The ranking of phoneme pairs from highest to lowest was 'ㅅ-ㅈ, ㄱ-ㅅ, ㄱ-ㅈ, ㄱ-ㅂ, ㄱ-ㅎ, ${\ldots}$, ㅆ-ㅋ, ㄸ-ㅋ, ㅉ-ㅋ, ㄹ-ㅃ, ㅃ-ㅋ'. The phonemes that played a major role in the formation of the minimal pair were /ㄱ, ㅅ, ㅈ, ㅂ, ㅊ/, in that order, which showed a high proportion of palatals. The correlation between the raw count of minimal pairs and the relative count of minimal pairs was found to be quite high r=0.937. Second, 87.91% of the minimal pairs shared the part of speech (same syntactic category). The most frequently observed type has been 'noun-noun' pair (70.25%), and 'vowel-vowel' pair (14.77%) was the next ranking. It can be indicated that the minimal pair could be grouped into similar categories in terms of semantics. The results of this study can be useful for various research in Korean linguistics, speech-language pathology, language education, language acquisition, speech synthesis, and artificial intelligence-machine learning as basic data related to Korean phonemes.