초록 열기/닫기 버튼
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Based on a spoken corpus, this study investigates phonetic realization of aspiration merger in Korean, whereby plain stops become aspirated before the fricative /h/. Unlike phonological prediction in the wake of the canonical rule application, the VOT analysis of stops in the merger environment in the Seoul corpus confirms that phonetic realization of aspiration is not categorical but gradient. The production pattern of aspiration across the four age groups of talkers ranging from their tens to their forties in the corpus shows that the age functions as an important factor in distribution of the VOT variation: the degree of aspiration turned out to be in inverse proportion to the age, reflecting the careless speech of the older speakers. The results also support the tendency that gradient phonetic realization of aspiration merger is affected by word type and prosodic structure conditioned by stops and their following fricative in the merger environment.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
aspiration, prosodic domain, VOT, spontaneous speech, Korean stops
