Word-final obstruent licensing, analogical leveling and gradience in the lexicon

Hyang-Sook Sohn(손형숙) 한국음운론학회 2007 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.13 No.1

There is an increasing tendency in the synchronic grammar of Korean, whereby marked non-coronals are reduced to unmarked lax obstruents and all coronal obstruents to alveolar fricative in word-final position. Word-final licensing in each sub-lexicon is represented by the ranking of I-O correspondence with respect to the markedness, and the merger of the gradiently related sublexicons is characterized by demotion of I-O correspondence. This study claims that the phonological change underway is an analogical leveling, as a parallel to the merger in the lexicon. Also claimed is that this recent development is induced by the statistically skewed lexicon and is gravitated towards a more densely sampled region in the lexicon. This is in accordance with the stochastic prediction that analogical leveling pivots around lexically frequent obstruents. By projecting a unified constraint ranking that encodes indexed I-O correspondence for each sublexicon, this study proposes a lexically conditioned grammar and accounts for the gradient nature of the lexicon.

영어 동사구의 통사구조와 음성적 실현

손형숙(Sohn, Hyang-Sook) 한국영어학회 2015 영어학 Vol.15 No.4

자연 발화 코퍼스에 기반한 한국어 폐쇄음의 격음화 실현 양상

손형숙(Sohn, Hyang-Sook),임신영(Shinyoung Lim),안미애(Miae Ahn) 언어과학회 2016 언어과학연구 Vol.0 No.78

Based on a spoken corpus, this study investigates phonetic realization of aspiration merger in Korean, whereby plain stops become aspirated before the fricative /h/. Unlike phonological prediction in the wake of the canonical rule application, the VOT analysis of stops in the merger environment in the Seoul corpus confirms that phonetic realization of aspiration is not categorical but gradient. The production pattern of aspiration across the four age groups of talkers ranging from their tens to their forties in the corpus shows that the age functions as an important factor in distribution of the VOT variation: the degree of aspiration turned out to be in inverse proportion to the age, reflecting the careless speech of the older speakers. The results also support the tendency that gradient phonetic realization of aspiration merger is affected by word type and prosodic structure conditioned by stops and their following fricative in the merger environment.

영어 접사첨가형에 나타난 어간말 폐쇄음의 기식성 실현과 음성적 충실성

손형숙(Sohn, Hyang-Sook) 새한영어영문학회 2023 새한영어영문학 Vol.65 No.2

Measuring the VOT of the stem-final stops in affixed forms, this paper examines the relationship between the word-final release noise and the comparable stem-final burst noise in affixed forms. The experiment indicated that the three types of level 2 suffixes are not altogether parallel with respect to their effect on aspiration of the preceding stem-final stops. Also indicated is that the gradient realization of aspiration in affixed forms is affected by the phonological context of the stem, which in turn effects gradience of the release noise in the word-final stops (Kang 2003). These results suggest that the two allophonic properties of the release noise and the corresponding burst noise are related as perceptual cues in the wake of morphological variation. In this perspective, the burst noise of stem-final stops is interpreted as an effort to preserve the word-final release noise. This type of output-to-output correspondence in allophonic release-to-burst noise between the base and the affixed forms emerges naturally in Optimality Theory through the affix-specific constraints and overapplication of Ident-BA over the normal markedness constraints.

운율경계에 위치한 어두 모음의 성문 특성 : 음향적 상관성을 중심으로

손형숙(Sohn Hyang-Sook) 한국음성학회 2010 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.2 No.3

This study provides a description of the glottal characteristics of the word-initial low vowels /a, æ/ in terms of a set of acoustic parameters and discusses glottal configuration as their acoustic correlates. Furthermore, it examines the effect of prosodic boundary on the glottal properties of the vowels, seeking an account of the possible role of prosodic structure based on prosodic theory. Acoustic parameters reported to indicate glottal characteristics were obtained from the measurements made directly from the speech spectrum on recordings of Korean and English collected from 45 speakers. They consist of two separate groups of native Korean and native English speakers, each including both male and female speakers. Based on the three acoustic parameters of open quotient (OQ), first-formant bandwidth (B1), and spectral tilt (ST), comparisons were made between the speech of males and females, between the speech of native Korean and native English speakers, and between Korean and English produced by native Korean speakers. Acoustic analysis of the experimental data indicates that some or all glottal parameters play a crucial role in differentiating the speech groups, despite substantial interspeaker variations. Statistical analysis of the Korean data indicates prosodic strengthening with respect to the acoustic parameters B1 and OQ, suggesting acoustic enhancement in terms of the degree of glottal abduction and the glottal closure during a vibratory cycle.

영어 무성폐쇄음의 단어 내 위치와 강세 유무에 따른 VOT 변이

손형숙(Sohn, Hyang-Sook),임신영(Lim, Shin-Young) 한국영어학회 2012 영어학 Vol.12 No.1

영어의 /Cr/과 /sCr/ 자음군 내 폐쇄음의 기식성 실현과 음성 단위의 음절구조

손형숙(Sohn, Hyang-Sook) 한국음성학회 2014 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.6 No.3

This study investigates the acoustic property of aspiration realized in English voiceless stops of /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters. VOT is measured from stops in these clusters produced by two groups; one from native speakers of English and the other from Korean native speakers. Aspiration of stops in different types of clusters is compared to various phonological factors such as location of stress, syllable type, and position in word. Pursuing the idea that phonetic realization is correlated with phonological representation, attempts are made to account for the gradient nature of aspiration of stops on the basis of syllable structure at the phonetic level, which may vary in the wake of resyllabification. Voiceless stops in /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters are further compared to results obtained in the previous study on /sC/ cluster. Variations in aspiration are also characterized in terms of segmental precedence relation of stops in the clusters, namely, post-[s], pre-[r], or both.

단어 내 위치에 따른 한국어 폐쇄음의 VOT 연구

손형숙(Hyang Sook Sohn),안미애(Mi Ae Ahn) 언어과학회 2011 언어과학연구 Vol.59 No.-

The purpose of this study is to compare the VOTs of Korean stops when they are placed in word-initial position and in an intervocalic environment word-medially. This investigation is implemented by measuring the VOT of isolated words spoken by Daegu Korean speakers in their twenties. Comparisons of the VOTs between word-initial and word-medial positions support the claim that the aspirated stops as well as the plain stops are the targets of the weakening process in the intervocalic environment in Korean, although the ratio of the VOT reduction of the plain stops in an intervocalic environment against a word-initial position remains by far greater than that of the aspirated stops. Findings in this study also include the fact that there is no variability in the VOT between male and female speakers in word-initial position. In the intervocalic environment, however, the VOT reduction rate turned out to be higher in male speakers than in female speakers, and this lends supporting evidence to the claim that male speakers are more prone to the weakening process than female speakers. Furthermore, the results of the acoustic analysis indicate that velar stops have longer VOT than bilabial or alveolar stops and that the aspirated stops have longer VOT than the plain or the tensed stops, regardless of their position in a word or the speaker`s sex. Unlike some previous studies where alveolars are reported to be longer than bilabials, however, the statistical results in this study do not show significant difference between these two places of articulation. (Kyungpook National University)

Morphological basis of sonorant assimilation in Korean

Hyang-Sook Sohn(손형숙) 한국음운론학회 2006 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.12 No.2

  Focusing on aspects of assimilation between two alveolar sonorants /n/ and /l/, this study provides an optimality-theoretic account of sonorant assimilation, where lateralization takes place when the lateral is followed by the nasal, but nasalization is the predominant pattern of assimilation when the precedence is reversed. This generalization holds true for different strata of the lexicon and different domains of the prosodic hierarchy. This study claims that morphological information on the status of morphemes in the domain of sonorant assimilation is crucial on account of geminate structure in the output. When two alveolar sonorants are in contact across the prosodic word boundary, the nature of geminate in the output is not feature-dependent, but stem-driven, and more specifically, faithfulness to the stem-final sonorant is more imperative than to the stem-initial sonorant.

한국어와 영어의 모음 발음영역에 대한 실험음성화적 연구

손형숙(Hyang Sook Sohn),안미애(Mi Ae Ahn) 언어과학회 2009 언어과학연구 Vol.49 No.-