Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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Korean speakers hyperarticulate vowels in polite speech

  • Oh, Eunhae (Department of English Language and Literature, Konkuk University) ;
  • Winter, Bodo (Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham) ;
  • Idemaru, Kaori (Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon)
  • Received : 2021.07.21
  • Accepted : 2021.09.09
  • Published : 2021.09.30
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Abstract

In line with recent attention to the multimodal expression of politeness, the present study examined the association between polite speech and acoustic features through the analysis of vowels produced in casual and polite speech contexts in Korean. Fourteen adult native speakers of Seoul Korean produced the utterances in two social conditions to elicit polite (professor) and casual (friend) speech. Vowel duration and the first (F1) and second formants (F2) of seven sentence- and phrase-initial monophthongs were measured. The results showed that polite speech shares acoustic similarities with vowel production in clear speech: speakers showed greater vowel space expansion in polite than casual speech in an effort to enhance perceptual intelligibility. Especially, female speakers hyperarticulated (front) vowels for polite speech, independent of speech rate. The implications for the acoustic encoding of social stance in polite speech are further discussed.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This paper was written as part of Konkuk University's research support program for its faculty on sabbatical leave in 2020.

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