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Oh, Eunjin. 2010. Speaker Gender and the Degree of Coarticulation. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 35-3, 743-766. Gender differences have been reported in many acoustic measures. This study investigated whether degrees of coarticulation vary as a function of speaker gender. Seven male and seven female native speakers of American English participated in the experiment. The degrees of vowel-to-vowel and consonant-to-vowel coarticulation were calculated by taking differences between estimated vowel target and contextual vowel values. While the results were, in general, inconsistent for vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, the degree of [u]-fronting in front vowel and alveolar consonant contexts displayed consistent results, the males showing larger degrees of [u]-fronting on average than the females. Considering the distribution of the English vowel inventory which shows greater levels of contrast in the height dimension, the inconsistency of gender differences in the degrees of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in the F1 dimension is not unexpected. The consistency of differences in the degrees of mean [u]-fronting in the front vowel and alveolar consonant contexts suggests that speaker gender will need to be considered for future studies investigating the degrees of coarticulation. It is also suggested that further investigation of coarticulatory differences between genders is necessary using a language with a smaller phonemic inventory and therefore larger amounts of coarticulation. (Ewha Womans University)