Accent-Epenthesis Interaction Revisited

Abstract

This study investigates the lexical statistical patterning in North Kyungsang Korean accent-epenthesis interaction. Previous phonetic studies of Korean epenthetic vowels showed that inserted vowels are not phonetically distinct from corresponding lexical vowels (Kim & Kochetov 2011; H-J. Kim 2015), suggesting that complete neutralization would not help NKK speakers access underlying representations of epenthetic vowels to avoid accenting epenthetic vowels. We performed a corpus study to examine whether other informative cues are available in the lexical probabilistic patterning, which might help NKK speakers with the covert interaction of accent and epenthesis. The results show that the lexical stochastic patterns would not provide a cue for the accent avoidance of epenthetic high vowels. Rather, it is assumed that there is a clear distinction of lexical strata in Korean phonology, helping NKK speakers learn the interaction. We propose a formal analysis adopting comparative phonotactics developed by Hayes (in press), based on two lexical strata: NATIVE and FOREIGN (e.g., Ito and Mester 1999). This analysis provides a better approach to accounting for the covert interaction that does not involve the learnability problem.