earticle

영어

Building on Chen & Clumeck's (1975) earlier report on Korean denaslization, we investigate phonetic variations of Korean nasals in different prosodic positions. Given the fact that nasals display vowel-like formants and those in themselves are coupled with vowels', this study takes an aerodynamic approach based on nasal flow trace data. We investigate nasals in two dimensions: on the segmental and prosodic levels. First, nasals in different positions within words and their influences on neighboring vowels were investigated. Airflow data along with spectral acoustic data show that onset nasals in word-intial position tend to denasalize and this denasalized onset nasals are correlated to a less degree of nasalization in the following vowels. Second, any prosodic structural effect on the denasalized phonetic variations of nasals was examined. Measurements of temporal presence of nasal activity along the prosodic constituents show that the less nasal activity occurs in higher prosodic levels.