Articulatory characteristics of focus in Korean

Abstract

The phonetic correlates of prominence in head prominence languages (e.g., English), where prominence is signaled by stress and pitch accent, are extensively studied. However, the phonetic profile of prominence in edge prominence languages, such as Korean, that realize prominence by phrasing is not well understood. Relevant work has mainly focused on the acoustic domain and boundary-related phenomena. The present study assesses the articulatory correlates of prominence in Seoul Korean by the means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA). Specifically, we examine the effect of presence of focus (contrastive focus versus absence of focus) and position of focus (initial versus final) on the consonant constriction gestures of utterances consisting of two four-syllable long accentual phrases (APs). Preliminary results suggest that constriction gestures are longer, faster, and, although weakly supported, larger in contrastive focus than in the unfocused condition. These effects are found on the onset consonants of the first two syllables of the focused AP when the latter is utterance-initial, but extend to the coda of the second syllable when focus is on the final AP. A theoretical account of prominence and its interaction with boundaries in edge-marking languages is proposed, with implications for a cross-linguistic model of prosody. [Work supported by NSF.]