Phoneme distribution and phonological processes of orthographic and pronounced phrasal words by syllable structure in the Seoul Corpus

Abstract

This study examined the phoneme distribution and phonological processes of orthographic and pronounced phrasal words according to syllable structure in the Seoul Corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 40 Korean speakers. To achieve the goal, the phrasal words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Seoul Corpus using Praat. Then, the onsets, peaks, codas, and syllable types of the phrasal words were analyzed using an R script. Results revealed that k0 was most frequently used as an onset in both orthographic and pronounced phrasal words. Also, aa was the most favored vowel in the Korean syllable peak with fewer phonological processes in its pronounced form. For the codas, nn accounted for 34.4% of the total pronounced phrasal words and was the varied form. From syllable type classification of the Corpus, CV appeared to be the most frequent type followed by CVC, V, and VC from the orthographic forms. Overall, the onsets were prevalent in the pronunciation more than the codas. From the results, the author concludes that an analysis of phoneme distribution and phonological processes in light of syllable structure can contribute greatly to the understanding of the phonology of spoken Korean.