말소리와 음성과학 (Phonetics and Speech Sciences)

  • 제7권2호
  • /
  • Pages.119-129
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  • 2015
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  • 2005-8063(pISSN)
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  • 2586-5854(eISSN)
한국음성학회 (Korean Society of Speech Sciences)
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On the Merger of Korean Mid Front Vowels: Phonetic and Phonological Evidence

  • 투고 : 2015.04.29
  • 심사 : 2015.06.15
  • 발행 : 2015.06.30
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초록

This paper investigates the status of the merger between the mid front unrounded vowels ㅔ[e] and ㅐ[${\varepsilon}$] in contemporary Korean. Our analysis is based on a balanced corpus of production and perception data from young subjects from three dialectal areas (Seoul, Daegu and Gwangju). Except for expected gender differences, the production data display no difference in the realization of these vowels, in any of the dialects. The perception data, while mostly in line with the production results, show that Seoul females tend to better discriminate the two vowels in terms of perceived height: vowels with a lower F1 are more likely to be categorized as ㅔ by this group. We then investigate the possible causes of this merger: based on an empirical study of transcribed spoken Korean, we show that the pair of vowels ㅔ/ㅐ has a very low functional load. We argue that this factor, together with the phonetic similarity of the two vowels, may have been responsible for the observed merger.

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피인용 문헌

  1. Production and Perception of English Vowels by College Students Before and After Lessons vol.7, pp.3, 2015, https://doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2015.7.3.079
  2. K-SPAN: A lexical database of Korean surface phonetic forms and phonological neighborhood density statistics vol.49, pp.5, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-016-0836-8
  3. On the role of contrastivity in the development of the /e $$\sim \upvarepsilon /$$∼ε/ merger in Korean vol.27, pp.2, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-018-9171-7