Acoustic evidence suggests that contemporary Seoul Korean may be developing a tonal system, which is arising in the context of a nearly completed change in how speakers use voice onset time (VOT) to mark the language’s distinction among tense, lax and aspirated stops. Data from 36 native speakers of varying ages indicate that while VOT for tense stops has not changed since the 1960s, VOT differences between lax and aspirated stops have decreased, in some cases to the point of complete overlap. Concurrently, the mean F0 for words beginning with lax stops is significantly lower than the mean F0 for comparable words beginning with tense or aspirated stops. Hence the underlying contrast between lax and aspirated stops is maintained by younger speakers, but is phonetically manifested in terms of differentiated tonal melodies : laryngeally unmarked (lax) stops trigger the introduction of a default L tone, while laryngeally marked stops (aspirated and tense) introduce H, triggered by a feature specification for [stiff ].

Acoustic evidence for the emergence of tonal contrast in contemporary Korean

Cochlear implants provide users with limited spectral and temporal information In this study, the amount of spectral and temporal information was systematically varied through simulations of cochlear implant processors using a noise-excited vocoder Spectral information was controlled by varying the number of channels between 1 and 16, and temporal information was controlled by varying the lowpass cutoff frequencies of the envelope extractors from 1 to 512 Hz Consonants and vowels processed using those conditions were presented to seven normal-hearing native-English-speaking listeners for identification The results demonstrated that both spectral and temporal cues were important for consonant and vowel recognition with the spectral cues having a greater effect than the temporal cues for the ranges of numbers of channels and lowpass cutoff frequencies tested The lowpass cutoff for asymptotic performance in consonant and vowel recognition was 16 and 4 Hz, respectively The number of channels at which performance plateaued for consonants and vowels was 8 and 12, respectively Within the above-mentioned ranges of lowpass cutoff frequency and number of channels, the temporal and spectral cues showed a tradeoff for phoneme recognition Information transfer analyses showed different relative contributions of spectral and temporal cues in the perception of various phonetic/acoustic features

Relative contributions of spectral and temporal cues for phoneme recognition

The Phoneme, first published in 1950, is now not only a standard work on its subject but comprises Daniel Jone's major and final expression of his theoretical attitudes. This is a reissue of the third edition (1967), which includes the appendix on the history and meaning of the term phoneme. It sets out in detail the author's conclusions about the nature and function of the phoneme, illustrating them from over 40 languages. The book continues to represent for the historian of language an important landmark in the development of linguistics.

The Phoneme: Its Nature and Use

We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide explicit accounts of several loanword adaptation phenomena (in Korean) in terms of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar model with the same three levels of representation that are needed to describe L1 phonology: the underlying form, the phonological surface form, and the auditory-phonetic form. The model is bidirectional, i.e. the same constraints and rankings are used by the listener and by the speaker. These constraints and rankings are the same for L1 processing and loanword adaptation.

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/papers/BoersmaHamannLoans35.pdf

Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception

How does phonology guide phonetics in segment–f0 interaction?

Korean is thought to be unique in having three kinds of voiceless stops: aspirated /ph th kh/, tense /p* t* k*/, and lax /p t k/. The contrast between tense and lax stops raises two theoretical problems. First, to distinguish them either a new feature [tense] is needed, or the contrast in voicing (or aspiration) must be increased from two to three. Either way there is a large increase in the number of possible stops in the world's languages, but the expansion lacks support beyond Korean. Second, initial aspirated and tense consonants correlate with a high tone, and lax and voiced consonants correlate with a low tone. The correlation cannot be explained in the standard tonogenesis model (voiceless-high and voiced-low). We argue instead that (a) underlyingly "tense" stops are regular voiceless unaspirated stops, and "lax" stops are regular voiced stops, (b) there is no compelling evidence for a new distinctive feature, and (c) the consonant-tone correlation is another case of voiceless-high and voiced-low. We conclude that Korean does not have an unusual phonology, and there is no need to complicate feature theory.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/B:JEAL.0000007344.43938.4e.pdf

Mi Ryoung Kim

Papers

“Tense” and “Lax” Stops in Korean