VOT and F0 Variation in Korean Stops: Measurements and Probing a Sociolinguistic View

• Published in: Language & Information Society Vol. 38; no. null; pp. 383 - 412
• Main Author: 이봉형
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 언어정보연구소 01.11.2019
• Subjects: 언어학
• ISSN: 1598-1886; 2713-6817
• DOI: 10.29211/soli.2019.38..014

This study devotes itself to exploring the variation of acoustic correlates associated with the Korean stop phonation. Since the seminal work of Lisker and Abramson (1964), acoustic and articulatory measurements for the laryngeal settings for the ternary distinctions of tense, lax and aspirated stops have been attempted by myriad practitioners of Korean sound patterns. For now, we have availed ourselves of the spoken database created by the National Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL) (2003). Thus, besides the measurements of acoustic properties per se, as reinventing the wheel, we aim to address the issue from a different angle: whether or not they are products of linguistics proper or sociolinguistic manifestations adjusted to meet the compelling social demands. One of the findings therein is that the striking shortening of VOT with aspirated consonants confirms the underpinning of previous literature on the role of VOT. Our novel finding is that the surge of F0 as an offset effect of VOT shrinkage is, for the present, limited to females with aspirated stops. Furthermore, an array of changes occurring to the laryngeal phonation entail that those phonetic modulations are currently underway rather than completed across-the-board. In relation to the categorization of the variation, the acoustic evidence and others to avail lead us to conclude that the phonation variation has a double-barreled character of extralinguistic adaptations to the social context as well as being hard-wired knowledge as part of the internal-language. KCI Citation Count: 0