Phonetic Variation in Korean /n/: A Corpus Study

Ahn, Miyeon

doi:10.30961/lr.2025.61.1.21

Lang. Res. 61(1):21-34

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2025.61.1.21

Article

Phonetic Variation in Korean /n/: A Corpus Study^*

Miyeon Ahn ¹ ^, ^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹Hankyong National University

^†Corresponding author: Associate professor Department of English Language and Culture Hankyong National University 327 Jungang-ro, Anseong, Gyeonggi-do 17579, Korea , E-mail: mahn@hknu.ac.kr

^* I sincerely appreciate the detailed comments and suggestions provided by the three reviewers.

ⓒ Copyright 2025 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Feb 05, 2025 ; Revised: Apr 10, 2025 ; Accepted: Apr 17, 2025

Published Online: Apr 30, 2025

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the dynamic acoustic properties of the postconsonantal nasal /n/ in Korean, which may be associated with the phonetic variation arising from three different phonological inputs. The inputs of the three types of /n/ sounds are (i) a canonical as in /kamnamu/ →[kamnamu] “a persimmon tree,” an epenthesized or inserted /kaŋnam_jʌk/ →[kaŋnamnjʌk] “Gangnam Station,” and a nasalized /tɨŋɹok/ → [tɨŋnok] “registration”. In this study, we examine the temporal and spectral properties of these three types of /n/ sounds – both the temporal duration and the first and second formant frequency values – in corpus data. Consonantal duration varies as a function of a particular age group and is characterized by an increase in duration from canonical to inserted /n/. Significant spectral variation is observed within the female group, with the inserted and nasalized types characterized by a low F1 and a high F2, respectively. The results partially support the idea that grammatical knowledge may contribute to phonetic variation, thus suggesting that language users may require more time to process phonologically complex linguistic representations.

Keywords: Korean /n/; canonical; inserted; nasalized; phonological complexity

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Phonetic Variation in Korean /n/: A Corpus Study*

ABSTRACT

References

Phonetic Variation in Korean /n/: A Corpus Study^*