It has been observed that a focused item in Korean is by and large realized with higher pitch, longer duration and greater intensity. But it is not fully clear how much focus affects the pre-focus and post-focus regions. The present study examines the full scale of focus effect in Korean in pre-focus, on-focus and post-focus words. Results show that focused words have significantly increased F0, duration and intensity, post-focus words have significantly reduced F0, duration and intensity, but pre-focus words lack systematic changes in any of these parameters. Thus Korean seems to resemble languages like English and Mandarin that exhibit post-focus compression (PFC), but differ from Taiwanese and Cantonese where PFC has been found to be absent.
Index Terms: pre-focus, on-focus, post-focus, duration, F0, intensity, post-focus compression, PFC
Cite as: Lee, Y.-c., Xu, Y. (2010) Phonetic realization of contrastive focus in Korean. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 033
@inproceedings{lee10_speechprosody,
author={Yong-cheol Lee and Yi Xu},
title={{Phonetic realization of contrastive focus in Korean}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 033}
}