Yoon, Tae-Jin. 2015. Corpus-based Study of Durational Adjustment in Korean. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.2. 279-295.

Research in spoken language has shown that an individual speech sound can be produced differently in different structural contexts in spite of presumably the same lexical representation. Cues for a linguistically organized framework can be found in these contextually determined variant phonetic characteristics. This paper examines the patterns of duration adjustment of ‘ta’, ‘ka’, and ‘neun’ in Standard Korean when these segmental sequences occupy different constituents within a word or a phrase. The results indicate that the phonetic manifestation of the utterance boundary is conditioned by linguistically organized structure. They also suggest that the failure of earlier studies to find the effect of phrase-initial lengthening may be due to the greater variation in that position. The findings observed in the study may be a reading characteristic observed in the reading style by male speakers, which warrants detailed phonetic analyses for more speakers of different genders and more speaking styles as well as speaker-dependent variations. (Sungshin Women's University) 

Keywords: Boundary-related duration, preboundary domain, syllable nucleus, Corpus of Standard Korean