An apparent-time study of an ongoing sound change in Seoul Korean: A prosodic account

The f0 perturbation effects in focus marking: Evidence from Korean and Japanese

Many studies showed that prosodic cues such as f0, duration and intensity are used in focus marking cross-linguistically. Usually, on-focus words exhibit expansions of acoustic cues such as f0 expansion, whereas post-focus words may show compression of acoustic cues. However, how features in a sub-syllabic level are employed in focus marking remain to be investigated. F0 perturbation refers to the phenomenon that vocal folds vibration is affected by the preceding non-sonorant consonant. The current study aims to examine how f0 perturbation is realized in focus marking in two languages Japanese and Korean. Tokyo Japanese is a pitch-accent language and Seoul Korean is considered to be at the stage of quasi-tonogenesis. Our results showed that f0 perturbation effects were enhanced in on-focus positions and compressed in pre- and post-focus positions for both narrow and contrastive focus in both languages. In addition, our results showed that pitch accent can also affect the realization of f0 perturbation in various focus conditions. Compared to Korean, our results in Japanese showed that f0 perturbation effects were less restricted. These results provide new insights into the current model of communicative functions that sub-syllabic level acoustic cues such as f0 perturbation can also be employed in focus marking.

Production of coda voicing contrast of L2 English by native Mandarin Chinese speakers in comparison with native Korean speakers

This study investigates native language effects on phonetic encoding of coda voicing contrast in L2 English by Chinese versus Korean speakers. Results show much smaller phonetic differences in both vowel duration and F0 in marking coda voicing contrast for Chinese speakers than Korean speakers, despite native Chinese speakers' experience with lexical tones. They suggest that producing an F0-related cue in L2 is conditioned by position-specific phonological richness and use of F0 in the speaker's L1. The results are discussed in terms of contrast maximization and effort minimization with reference to the information structure occurring in both L1 and L2.