음성음운형태론연구 19집 3호 Ahn, Mee-Jin
Ahn, Mee-Jin. 2013. Acoustic duration of Korean nasals. Studies in phonetics, phonology and morphology 19.3. 411-431.
This paper examines the acoustic duration of Korean nasals in three different positions and three different vowel contexts to find the relationship between the nasal weakening and the nasal duration. Korean nasals have been observed as weakened, orally released or denasalized in the word-initial position (Umeda 1957, Chen and Clumeck 1975, Ohala 1997, Takeyasu 2004, Yoshida 2008, Kim 2011). The experiment in this study reveals that the word-initial nasals are shorter than word-medial and -final nasals; the word-initial nasals are longer before vowel /i/ or /u/ than before vowel /a/; bilabial nasals are longer than alveolar nasals; the word-initial nasals lack clear visible nasal formants and 24% of word-initial nasals are partially voiceless; and alveolar nasals are more frequently devoiced than bilabial nasal in word-initial position. The findings of the experiment support that Korean nasals are weakened with their short acoustic duration in the word-initial position, in which other consonants strengthened with their longer acoustic duration. In addition, the alveolar nasals which are reported as with more frequent nasal weakening or denasalization, turned out to have shorter duration and more frequently devoiced than the other nasals. However, the effect of vowel height on the nasal closure duration suggests that the duration of nasal closure itself cannot be an invariable perceptual cue to nasality and that the quality of the nasal closure is crucial for the perception of nasality. (Pai Chai University)