Durational Correlates of Prosodic Categories: The Case of Two Korean Voiceless Coronal Fricatives

  • Yoon, Kyu-Chul (Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University)
  • Published : 2005.03.01

Abstract

This paper is a production study of the effects of Korean prosody on two voiceless coronal fricatives /$s^h$/ and /s*/. The target segments were embedded in four prosodic positions: initial to the Intonational Phrase or the Accentual Phrase, and medial to the Accentual Phrase or to the Prosodic Word. Acoustic measurements showed that the durational differences associated with the /$s^h$/ versus /s*/ contrast vary in magnitude in different prosodic positions, confirming the proposal that segmental properties are affected by prosodic categories. This suggests that any speech synthesizer should take into consideration prosodically conditioned durational variation.

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