• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.67-87
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to show how the coda of a syllable and word-final clusters are represented in the English syllable structure. Previous theories on the syllable assume that there is only one segment in the coda position. And, as we know, the theories that license only one segment in the coda make it difficult to syllabicate the word-final cluster appropriately when more than two segments in the word-final cluster are encountered. I considered three approaches: the previous syllable structure (Selkirk, 1982; Borowsky 1989), sonority sequencing (Giegerich, 1992; Roca, 1999) and feature analysis (Goldsmith, 1990), But, all the considered methods don't give us a satisfactory explanation regarding word-final clusters. Finally, I will suggest a modified syllable representation as an alternative by placing two different appendixes under the Phonological Word which forms a constituent above the syllable node. From this it is possible to explain the former problematic word-final clusters including morphological information asan inflectional suffix in the structure.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.129-140
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• 2009

The purpose of the present study is to investigate frequency related information and syllable structure constraints on Sino-Korean. Previous studies on Sino-Korean have mostly investigated the historical change of sounds and reviewed archaic features of Chinese language in Sino-Korean. Unfortunately, there is little study on the sounds of contemporary Sino-Korean in terms of syllable structure constraints. For the purpose of the present study, sounds of 7,742 Chinese characters used in Sino-Korean (7,795 syllables) were investigated and syllable matrices made based on the results of frequency related information. As a result, 483 syllable types were observed and the most frequently observed syllables were as follows: /ku/ (103) > /ki/ (100) > /ju/ (87) > /pi/ (86). Only 16 out of 19 consonants are used for Sino-Korean. /$t^{\ast}$/ and /$p^{\ast}$/ are never used in Sino-Korean and /kh, $s^{\ast}$, $k^{\ast}$/ occur only a few times (3, 2, 1 respectively). /k/ (17.5%) shows the highest frequency and /n, ${\eta}$, 1, tc, m/ occupied the next rankings. Among 20 vowel types, /a/ showed the highest frequency and /o, u, i, $j{\Lambda}$, ${\Lambda}$/ occupied the next rankings. Based on the syllable matrices, gaps were observed and classified into accidental or systematic ones. Onset and nucleus, nucleus and coda, onset and coda, and other syllable structure constraints of Sino-Korean were listed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.237-248
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• 2003

This paper compares the syllable structure of French and Korean analyzing the speech data of these two languages recorded during the actual speech. Reference to the syllable structure of French is made from F. Wioland's research data. As for the Korean data, the primary data are drawn from the 30-minute radio interview in which two male TV anchors in their early 60s talk to each other. The secondary source of the data is collected by having the primary data replicated by the two male announcers in their early 20's broadcasting in the university ra야o station of KAIST. With reference to the data collected in French and Korean, this paper provides the statistical frequency of each type of syllable structure in each language through the acoustic analysis of the spectrograms and renders a phonetic account of the characteristics of each syllable type in the two languages. Also discussed in this paper is the distributional condition in which each syllable structure is laid out in the speech context.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.139-145
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• 2015

The present study investigates the effects of syllable structure and prosodic prominence on the patterns of tonal alignment and scaling of the phrase-initial rise in Seoul Korean. Two syllable structures (Onset (/#CVC.../ as in minsa) vs. No-onset (/#VC.../ as in insa)) and two prominence conditions (Focus vs. Neutral) were considered. Results showed that the alignment of the L and the H tones in the phrase-initial rise was affected by syllable structure but not by prominence. The time of L was before the vowel onset of the first syllable in the Onset condition (i.e., within the onset consonant) and it was after the vowel onset in the No-onset condition. The difference was attributable to the fact that the initial L was anchored at a fixed distance from the phrase boundary, which was about 30ms after the onset of the syllable in both cases. The time of H was also consistently observed about 20ms after the second vowel onset (i.e., /a/ in minsa/insa). Moreover, the rise time (the duration from the L to the H tones) was longer as the local syllable duration became longer due to different syllable structure and prominence conditions. Taken together, the results provide a support for the segmental anchoring hypothesis, which claims that both the beginning and the end of F0 movement are consistently aligned with segmental 'anchor' points with relatively high stability (Ladd et al., 1999). Results also showed that the scaling of the early rise was slightly influenced by syllable structure but not by prominence. The differences between the results of the current study and a previous study (Cho, 2011) are further discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2016

This paper investigated the phoneme distribution and phonological processes of orthographic and pronounced phrasal words in light of syllable structure in the Seoul Corpus in order to provide linguists and phoneticians with a clearer understanding of the Korean language system. To achieve the goal, the phrasal words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Seoul Corpus using Praat. Following this, the onsets, peaks, codas and syllable types of the phrasal words were analyzed using an R script. Results revealed that k0 was most frequently used as an onset in both orthographic and pronounced phrasal words. Also, aa was the most favored vowel in the Korean syllable peak with fewer phonological processes in its pronounced form. The total proportion of all diphthongs according to the frequency of the peaks in the orthographic phrasal words was 8.8%, which was almost double those found in the pronounced phrasal words. For the codas, nn accounted for 34.4% of the total pronounced phrasal words and was the varied form. From syllable type classification of the Corpus, CV appeared to be the most frequent type followed by CVC, V, and VC from the orthographic forms. Overall, the onsets were more prevalent in the pronunciation more than the codas. From the results, this paper concluded that an analysis of phoneme distribution and phonological processes in light of syllable structure can contribute greatly to the understanding of the phonology of spoken Korean.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.1
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• pp.113-135
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• 1997

This study aims to present some notes on the French syllabic structure based on the relation between the intonation pattern and the stressed syllable. The recent phonetico-phonological study is mainly focussed on the notion of syllable. However it is quite difficult to analyse the syllable structure because of its complexity. In this paper I have tried to analyse the French syllabic structure both in phonetics and in phonology. This paper contains three parts. First of all, in section 2, the notion of syllable and the French prosodic phenomena are reviewed phonetically, and is phonologically focused on the intonation pattern. Secondly, in section 3, I have analyzed the relation between the intonation. pattern and the stressed syllable in French based on CSL analyses. Finally, in section 4, I have suggested some syllabic structure patterns in French based on the analyses in section 3. This. is an attempt to further the inter-disciplinary study between phonetics and phonology, and also an attempt to settle on a model of phonological French syllabic structure. I have left the application of the result of this study as a future subject to study. But still, the result of this study can serve as a basic reference for those who are studying French and for students who are would like to learn about French syllabic structure.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.11-16
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• 2016

This study explores the phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary to provide phoneticians and linguists with fundamental phonetic data on English word components. Entry words in the dictionary file were syllabified using an R script and examined to obtain the following results: First, English words preferred consonants to vowels in their word components. In addition, monophthongs occurred much more frequently than diphthongs. When all consonants were categorized by manner and place, the distribution indicated the frequency order of stops, fricatives, and nasals according to manner and that of alveolars, bilabials and velars according to place. These results were comparable to the results obtained from the Buckeye Corpus (Yang, 2012). Second, from the analysis of syllable structure, two-syllable words were most favored, followed by three- and one-syllable words. Of the words in the dictionary, 92.7% consisted of one, two or three syllables. This result may be related to human memory or decoding time. Third, the English words tended to exhibit discord between onset and coda consonants and between adjacent vowels. Dissimilarity between the last onset and the first coda was found in 93.3% of the syllables, while 91.6% of the adjacent vowels were different. From the results above, the author concludes that an analysis of the phonetic symbols in a dictionary may lead to a deeper understanding of English word structures and components.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.13-24
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• 1998

This study aims at examining the relationship between tonal events and their related vowel and syllable duration in Korean. Two things were investigated: one is to see if there is a hierarchical relationship in prosodic unit-final-lengthening and the other is to see if accentual phrase initial high tone syllable gets lengthened. Generally, higher prosodic units show larger degree of lengthening of the final vowel and also final syllable duration than the lower ones except for accentual phrase: Mean duration of utterance-final or intonational-phrase-final syllable(and its vowels) was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable(and its vowels). However, mean duration of accentual phrase final syllable was shorter than that of word final syllable. Mean vowel duration of accentual phrase initial high tone syllable was shorter than that of any other prosodic unit. Its mean syllable duration, however, was longer than that of accentual-phrase-final or word-final syllable, indicating that strong consonants(fortis and aspirated) frequently appear in the accentual phrase initial position and this position is a prosodically strong position showing longer duration as well as high tone.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.43-56
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• 2005

This study was analyzed the syllable structure of Korean and Chinese using subjective sound similarity judgement tasks with both Korean-chinese and Chinese students in Shenyang, China. 86 college students were administered with the tasks which lasted about 20 min. in a small group setting. Both Korean-chinese and Chinese students showed the sensitivity for the CV sub-syllabic unit and the CV+C was the building block for phonetic representation for both languages. This syllabic similarity of Korean and Chinese may be a help for Korean-chinese to become horizontal bilinguals. Further studies are needed to specify the mechanism that will explain the syllabic perception of CV+C in both Korean and Chinese which was different from that of C+VC structure dominance in English.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.121-130
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• 2014

This study investigates the acoustic property of aspiration realized in English voiceless stops of /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters. VOT is measured from stops in these clusters produced by two groups; one from native speakers of English and the other from Korean native speakers. Aspiration of stops in different types of clusters is compared to various phonological factors such as location of stress, syllable type, and position in word. Pursuing the idea that phonetic realization is correlated with phonological representation, attempts are made to account for the gradient nature of aspiration of stops on the basis of syllable structure at the phonetic level, which may vary in the wake of resyllabification. Voiceless stops in /Cr/ and /sCr/ clusters are further compared to results obtained in the previous study on /sC/ cluster. Variations in aspiration are also characterized in terms of segmental precedence relation of stops in the clusters, namely, post-[s], pre-[r], or both.