Tonal alignment in Seoul Korean

Abstract

Bruce found that a local F0 peak is aligned very precisely in time with the segmental material in Swedish [Swedish word accents in sentence perspective (1977)]. Alternatively, it is possible that such F0 peaks may function as edge markers, and hence not necessarily be aligned with any particular aspect of the word-internal structure. This study investigates how an initial high tone is aligned in time with the segmental material in Standard Korean. Recordings of two speakers of Seoul Korean producing three-syllable words with various syllable structure combinations in two prosodic conditions were digitized and analyzed. One speaker shows no apparent pattern of alignment with the segmental material; peaks are simply reached at a fixed duration from the beginning of the utterance regardless of the structure of the word. Another speaker, however, shows that initial high tones fall into two distinct groups, ones aligned with initial syllables and ones aligned with second syllables. This syllable association is statistically related to syllable composition. These results suggest that Korean tone alignment is currently in a state of fluctuation between durationally fixed edge tones and tones associated with internal syllables according to a stochastic rule.