Intrinsic versus interaction effects on F0

Abstract

This study investigates the nature and magnitude of the effect of segments, initial and final consonants, vowel quality, and vowel length on F0 contour in English and Korean. The two languages were compared with a special reference of the effect of initial consonants on F0. F0 was measured at three temporal locations of each syllable rime onset, midpoint, and offset. For Korean, of the four segment types, initial consonants had the greatest effect on F0 contour in both spectral and temporal magnitude, indicating that consonant types interacted with tone. The English data showed that the segmental influence reflected intrinsic effects on F0. In particular, the effects of initial consonants on F0 contours in English were significantly smaller in spectral and temporal extent than those of Korean. This study concluded that there are cross-linguistic differences between English and Korean concerning the effect of initial consonants on F0 contour (which I call ‘‘intrinsic’’ versus ‘‘interaction’’). The consonant–tone interactions in Korean are viewed as consistent with tonogenesis: voiceless (aspirated and tense) consonants correlate lead H and phonologically voiced (lax, sonorants, and zero) consonants lead LH. This is the first study that accounts for the Korean interaction phenomena by a theory of tonogenesis.