Acoustic Manifestations of Lexical Prosody in Daegu Korean

Acoustic Manifestations of Lexical Prosody in Daegu Korean

  Daegu Korean (hereafter DK) is well known to exhibit distinctive lexical prosodic patterns. However, there are only a limited number of phonetic studies about DK prosody. The current study aimed to investigate phonetic manifestations of lexical prosodic patterns in Daegu Korean. This study analyzed F0, vowel duration, and intensity of vowels in disyllabic words produced in three different speaking conditions. This paper provided phonetic details about each measurement in Condition 1, and compared three conditions focusing on F0 movements. The study found that F0 is the most significant acoustic correlate of the prosodic patterns in DK and vowel duration and intensity do not correlate with F0. On the basis of the phonetic analyses, the paper raised some questions about previous categorizations, especially LH and H:H pattern. In the case of H:H pattern, the results of this study support Y. Chung"s (2002) argument for contour tone. The paper offered other possible preliminary analyses about LH and H:H pattern and proposed future studies to obtain more definite answers.