Temporal Variation and Production Plan: A Corpus Analysis of [tʃ] and [tʃh] in Korean
Miyeon Ahn (Hankyong National University)
Abstract
It is well-known that segmental durations greatly vary depending on many linguistic
factors such as positions within words amongst others. By adopting the corpus-based
analysis of The Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Yun et al. 2015), we
examine the acoustic properties of the two phones of [tʃ] and [tʃh] in Korean and to
understand the various nature of the sounds. We argue that even positionally-identical
phones reveal various durational properties according to the grammatical rule
application. Specifically, both [tʃ] and [tʃh] emerge on the surface but they may be
either (i) same as the UR /tʃ/ or /tʃh/ → [tʃ] or [tʃh], i.e., canonical [tʃ] and [tʃh] with no
rule application, or (ii) different from UR /t/ or /th/ → [tʃ] or [tʃh], i.e., derived [tʃ] and
[tʃh] generated after palatalization rule application. The corpus analysis showed that
the derived [tʃ] and [tʃh] was significantly longer than the canonical ones and this
temporal variation is attributed to the consideration of grammatical components. It is
suggested that speakers plan their production differently depending on whether or not
they apply grammatical rules during the production process and they arrange
articulators accordingly, which partly leads to the temporal variations of [tʃ] and [tʃh].
Keywords
canonical, derived, duration, [tʃ], [tʃh], production plan