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This study investigates the phonetic variation of the English word ‘to’ as a function of its syntactic head status. There are several factors which influence the phonetic realization of segments or words such as position in an utterance, phrasal accent, and word class. However, it has not been investigated how words, specifically function words, are phonetically differently manifested depending on their syntactic head status. Based on the seven-year (2011 to 2017) English listening data of College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), the effects of syntactic head on the phonetic realization of the English function word ‘to’ were investigated. Five acoustic measurements of duration, F1, F2, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F0) were compared between the lexical head ‘to’ (i.e., preposition ‘to’) and the functional head ‘to’ (i.e., inflection ‘to’). Results show that the phonetic manifestations of the function word ‘to’ are sensitive to its syntactic head status as a lexical or functional head, and that the syntactic head effect is mostly found in terms of duration and F1.
