Emergence of word prosody in (Seoul) Korean

Abstract

It has been argued that Korean has recently developed an F0 distinction word-initially partially replacing the VOT distinction of the three stop categories, lax, aspirated, tense. This change has been characterized as tonogenesis, but since the contrast is not on all syllables, it seems to be more consistent with a pitch accent language than a tone language. We investigate the prosodic patterns of trisyllabic words to assess a) whether the VOT-to-F0 change is only word-initial or if it also occurs in other syllables, b) if there is evidence of word level prominence on one syllable supporting a pitch accent interpretation. The data from 10 Korean speakers yield conflicting evidence for both tonal and pitch accent prosodic systems.