UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates the prosodic modulations, i.e., boundary- and prominence-marking, and their interactions on articulation in Seoul Korean via an electromagnetic articulography study. Prosodic structure has the function of encoding meaning by two means, one by marking phrasal boundaries and another by marking prominence. Both boundary- and prominence-marking are expressed through prosodic strengthening, which refers to “strong” articulation encompassing a spatial and/or temporal expansion of articulatory movements. Under the assumption that prosodic structure serves a dual function of marking grouping and prominence, the two kinds of prosodic strengthening are regarded to be manifested differentially in speech production. However, evidence for this largely comes from head-prominence languages, in which the two functions of prosody are more apart from each other. In this dissertation, phonetic modulations of the two prosodic functions are investigated in Seoul Korean, which is an edge-prominence language, i.e., a language that marks prominence by boundary-marking. In addition, Seoul Korean is known to not have word prosody.

The dissertation includes two research articles. The first article examines how boundaries at major phrases, i.e., Intonational Phrase (IP), are marked and how they interact with the prosodic level of Accentual Phrases (AP), in which prominence is marked in Korean. The second article examines the articulatory profile of focus-induced prominence and compares it to that of non-focused gestures. Whether different types of focus exert different effects on articulation is also examined. In addition, a derived goal of the dissertation is to test whether the well-known interrelationships between kinematic parameters depend on prosodic function, differentiating thus the prosodic marking of phrasal boundaries from that of prominence.

Results suggest distinct articulatory modulations of boundary- and prominence-marking in Seoul Korean. Gestures at the right-edge of an IP boundary are longer, larger, and slower than phrase-medial counterparts. While phrase-final lengthening consistently affects the phrase-final syllable, its amount or scope is sensitive to focus location and the presence of factors useful to demarcating the last word of the phrase. Under focus-induced prominence, gestures are longer and larger, but not faster per se. Furthermore, it is shown that prosodic prominence is driven by focus, and is not an effect coming from domain-initial strengthening at the AP level. Different focus types systematically exert different degrees of articulatory modulation, suggesting connection between information structure and prosodic structure. Finally, throughout the dissertation, a robust effect of prosodic function on the relationship between kinematic parameters is observed: Each type of prosodic marking, i.e., IP boundary-marking and prominence-marking, presents a distinct relationship between duration and peak velocity normalized over displacement, which is often used as an estimate of stiffness.