Vowel Compression due to Syllable Number in English and Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Strong compression effects in a stressed vowel due to the addition of syllables have been adopted as evidence for stress-timing. In relation to this, Yun (2002) investigated the compression effects of number of syllables on Korean vowel. The results generally revealed that Korean had neither significant nor consistent anticipatory or backwards compression effects, especially when it came to the sentence level. This led us to claim that Korean would not be a stress0timed language. But the language investiga5ted in the study was only Korean, and further cross-linguistic research was needed to confirm the claim. In this study, Yun's (2002) sentence level data are compared with Fowler's (1981) English data. The comparison reveals that Korean seems to be similar to English inthe backwards compression effect, whereas the two languages are markedly different in the anticipatory compression effect. Thus, if English is a stress-timed language and the strong anticipatory compression effect is evidenct in favour of stress-timing as is claimed, the present cross-linguistic study confirms Yun's (2002) suggestion - Korean is unlikely to be stress-timed. On the other hand, compression effcts are revisited: the differences in vowel compression between English and Korean arediscussed from the syntactic and phonological points of view.