A phonetic comparison of epenthetic /ɨ/ and lexical /ɨ/ in Korean spontaneous speech

• Published in: Linguistic research pp. 203 - 225
• Main Author: 이현진
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 언어정보연구소 01.03.2025
• Subjects: 언어학
• ISSN: 1229-1374
• DOI: 10.17250/khisli.42.1.202503.008

This study investigates the acoustic features (i.e., vowel formants and durations) of epenthetic /ɨ/ and lexical /ɨ/in Korean spontaneous speech. While epenthetic vowels often differ phonetically from lexical vowels in terms of formants and/or duration across many languages (Davidson 2006; Gouskova and Hall 2009), previous studies on Korean epenthetic /ɨ/ and lexical/ɨ/ in read speech have shown no significant acoustic differences between these two vowels (Kim 2009; Kim and Kochetov 2011). Given that speech styles influence the acoustic features of vowels (Koopmans-van Beinum 1980; Harmegnies and Poch-Olivé1992), it is worth examining the acoustic features of epenthetic /ɨ/ and lexical /ɨ/ across different speech styles in Korean. Thus, in this study, political debates from the Korean Broadcast News Speech (Strassel et al. 2006) were analyzed as Korean spontaneous speech. The results showed no significant differences in the first and second formants between epenthetic /ɨ/ and lexical /ɨ/; however, epenthetic /ɨ/ had a shorter duration than lexical /ɨ/ in spontaneous speech. This shorter duration is possibly a result of the less prominent nature of epenthetic /ɨ/ in terms of duration compared to lexical /ɨ/,and this difference becomes more noticeable in spontaneous speech where phonetic reduction is more common than in read speech where articulation is more precise. KCI Citation Count: 0