• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.35-41
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• 2017

The existence and the extent of vowel length difference before voiced/voiceless consonants in English and Korean are examined in three groups: (1) Korean-speaking Americans (group A), (2) immigrants who moved to the U.S. in their early teens (group I), and (3) Koreans who have been in the U.S. for less than 3 years (group K). 14 subjects were recorded reading 10 English and 10 Korean sentences. The results show that the three groups exhibit different patterns of the vowel length difference: Group A shows a very strong tendency of vowel lengthening before voiced consonants in both English and Korean, while Group I shows less degree of vowel lengthening, and Group K shows almost no tendency of vowel length difference in both languages. This strongly suggests that, (1) unlike English, Korean does not have the vowel length difference depending on the following consonants, and (2) the vowel lengthening effect observed in Korean (L2) speech in group A may be the result of transfer of the phonetic trait acquired in English (L1). It also implies that, in teaching pronunciation, some facts such as the vowel length difference cannot be expected to be acquired automatically for the learners of English, but have to be taught explicitly.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

This study examines the duration of Korean lax and tense stops in the prosodic word-medial position, their interactions with nearby segments, and the phonological implications of these interactions. It first examines the lengthening of consonants at the function of the short lax stop. Experiment 1 shows that the sonorant C1 is significantly longer before a short lax stop C2 than before a long tense stop. Experiment 2 shows that the short lax stop C1 cancels the contrast between the lax and tense obstruent at C2, making them appear as long tense obstruents (Post-Stop Tensing Rule). We suggest that such lengthening phenomena occur in Korean to robustly preserve the contrastive length difference between C and CC. Second, this study examines the vowel shortening, known as Closed-Syllable Vowel Shortening, before a long tense stop or before the consonant sequence. Experiment 3 suggests that it be interpreted as temporal adjustment to make the interval from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel of near-equal length. Conclusively, we suggest that Korean speech be planned and controlled with two specific intervals. One is the duration of contrastive consonant intervals between vowels, and the other is the duration from the onset of a vowel to the onset of the following vowel.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.141-151
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• 2014

This study reports anti-hierarchical initial-syllable lengthening of an utterance-internal phrase in Korean. That is, the phrase-initial syllable (e.g., /a/ of "apa-do" or /ma/ of "mapa-do") starting with a voiced phoneme (i.e., vowels or voiced consonants) manifests itself as significantly longer when it is preceded by another phrase without a pause than when it leads an utterance or follows a pause utterance-internally. The phenomenon was examined with regard to two other factors: (1) tempo and (2) tenseness of the consonant (/p, $p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/) following the target syllable /a/. First, the effect of tempo on initial lengthening was not significant. Apart from the statistical significance, however, a tendency was observed, i.e., the slower the tempo is, the greater the lengthening. By contrast, the faster the tempo is, the higher the ratio (%) of lengthening. Second, contrary to our expectations, initial-syllable lengthening was even greater before tense stops /$p^{\prime}$, $p^h$/ than before lax stop /p/ regardless of tempo, and it was remarkable when it comes to the ratio (%), which means that initial lengthening is free of the pre-consonantal vowel shortening effect. Final-syllable lengthening is a pre-boundary marker, while the initial-syllable lengthening is regarded as a post-boundary marker of a phrase.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.201-210
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• 2002

This paper explores whether there is correlation between consonants' place and duration of adjacent vowels in English and Korean. The results showed that in English the vowels preceding alveolar stops were in general longer than the vowels before bilabial or velar stops. Consonants appeared to have their inherent length due to their place and to exhibit some compensatory effects on the duration of preceding vowels. This effect can be explained in a physiological term that the tongue tip is the organ which might be more agile in articulatory movement than the tongue body for the velars or the lower lip (and the jaw) for the bilabials is and the shorter production time of the alveolars caused the lengthening of the adjacent vowels. However, this physiological account did not hold in the case of Korean, which exhibited less consistent patterns across speakers for the consonants' place and the vowel duration. The segmental duration seemed to be timed quite consistently within a language but the pattern was not universal across languages.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.13-24
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• 1998

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.107-120
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• 2006

The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether Korean learners can use the vowel duration cue to distinguish voicing contrasts in word-final consonants in English. Given that the Korean group's performance on the auditory task was much better than their performance on the identification task or on the production task, we conclude that the AX discrimination task makes contact with a different layer of perception. In particular, the AX discrimination task can be done at the auditory or phonetic level, where differences in vowel length are still encoded in the representation. In contrast, the identification and production tasks are probing the mental representation of vowel length and voicing. It was also founded that Korean speakers stored neither vowel length nor voicing in memorized representations and did not internalize the lengthening of the preceding vowel as a rule to differentiate the voicing contrasts of final consonants, even though they were able to detect the acoustic differences in vowel duration provided that they were tested in an appropriate task.