Going back to Akira Utsuki’s presentation at the 8th International Conference on Phonology and Morphology (June 2022, online conference) — there is some discussion about how the consonant type affects an utterance’s melody (from page 6) and peak delay. Before moving onto these, let’s quickly look at an example of Geyongsang’s word-level prosody.
This video shows that Gyeongsang speakers differentiate the four mathematical expressions, 22, 2e, e2, and ee, using tones, although ‘2’ and ‘e’ are both pronounced as /i/ in Korean. The four expressions sound just the same in Seoul Korean.
Consonants and speech melody
Try to pronounce vowels /a/ and /i/ in the same strength. Then /i/ sounds higher in pitch than /a/. This effect is intrinsic; sound segments naturally have different acoustic and perceptual properties. Another example is that an affricative like /tʃ/ (the initial and the final sounds of church) is intrinsically longer than, say, a plosive like /t/.
Korean has three categories of lenis (lax) /p, t, k/ (ㅂ, ㄷ, ㄱ), tense (fortis) /p*, t*, k*/ (ㅃ, ㄸ, ㄲ), and aspirated /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/ (ㅍ, ㅌ, ㅋ) consonants. (For an overview, see Shin, J., Kiaer, J., & Cha, J. (2012). The Sounds of Korean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139342858; I also wrote a summary in an open access article. See Section 1.1 here).
Compared to the lenis consonants, the tense and aspirated consonants are produced with a higher pitch and with greater tension and pressure in the vocal tract. These are intrinsic effects said above, but for Seoul Korean, these effects are so strong that the type of the consonant affects the speech melody, particularly at the beginning of a word group. See the figure below. AP refers to the Accentual Phrase (which is a prosodic group, a rhythm unit, or a sequence of syllables ‘grouped’). The red lines show the melodic contour. At the bottom, the circles represent each syllable and the figure shows how the pitch varies within the speaker’s pitch range (marked by two straight lines.)
This figure above shows two sentences; they differ only in a word in the second AP (‘juice’ in red vs ‘coffee’ in green). ‘Juice’ in Korean begins with a lenis consonant /tɕ/, but ‘coffee’ begins with an aspirated consonant /kʰ/. When Seoul speakers read these two sentences, they unconsciously raise the pitch for ‘coffee’, but not for ‘juice’.
Then, unlike Seoul Korean, Gyeongsang Korean has a lexical pitch accent or tones. Does this affect the relationship between the consonant type and the speech melody? It may be the case that the lexical pitch accent/tones determine the speech melody, so there could be little room for the consonant type to exercise any effect.
To answer this question, Kenstowicz & Park (2006, Laryngeal features and tone in Kyungsang Korean: a phonetic study. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology 12(2). 247–264) analysed speech from 7 Gyeongsang speakers (3 from near Busan, 4 from near Daegu, age between 20s and 40s). Their Gyeongsang speakers didn’t behave differently from Seoul speakers; pitch was raised when an AP began with an aspirated or fortis consonant.
Timing in speech melody
But the interplay between the consonant-melody relationship and the lexical tone in Gyeongsang Korean seems to affect when to make the pitch rise or fall.
Akira cites Seo (2022) in his slides (p. 7; see the slide for figures). It seems that Seo (2022) shows generational differences in how Gyeongsang speakers balance what’s required by the consonant type and their lexical tones.
For instance, when a word with a HL tone (e.g. High-Low, falling from a high pitch to low pitch over the word) begins with a lenis stop, speakers in fact begin to pronounce the word with a low pitch (because of the lenis stop) and raises the pitch to have a peak towards the end of the first syllable for the H tone. Then the pitch goes down from the peak (because the word is supposed to have the HL tone). But Seo (2022) observed that the timing of the pitch peak differed across generations. The peak was towards the end of the first syllable for someone who was born in the 1950s, but it was near the middle of the second syllable for someone born in the 1990s. This *might* show that young Gyeongsang Korean speakers are more like those in Seoul; the low pitch associated with the lenis stop is pushing the high lexical tone backwards.
This is very interesting, but Seo (2022) is written in Japanese which I can’t read.
[徐旼廷] 2022. 「韓国語大邱方言のアクセントの音声的実現様相における世代差に関する研究―語頭閉鎖音の音響特徴との関わりを中心に―」東京大学博士論文
Maybe someone else can do a brief of Seo (2022) in Korean or in English, or provide relevant examples?
Korean Linguistics 