The effect of prosodic focus varies by phrasal tones: the case of South Kyungsang Korean

This study examines the production and perception of corrective focus in South Kyungsang Korean, using phone number strings. It shows that focus prosody varies greatly by tonal pattern (HHL, HLL, LHT, LHL) within phrases. Prosodic focus in High-initial phrases was clearly produced and accurately recognized, compared to that in Low-initial phrases. Additionally, the identification rate of HLL was higher than that of HHL, mainly because the focused initial H of the HHL contrasted with the second H within phrases, in terms of pitch. The results confirm that the encoding of prosodic focus is not uniform within a language; rather, focus prosody within a language can vary depending on the tonal pattern of an utterance.

Variation and change in the nominal pitch-accent system of South Kyungsang Korean

This paper considers whether the phonology of the lexical pitch accent of Kyungsang Korean is being maintained by younger innovative speakers. We examine the pitch-accent patterns of nouns with various suffixes by comparing the speech of innovative Kyungsang speakers to that of older conservative speakers. It will be shown that while innovative speakers maintain the underlying distinction in the lexical pitch accent found with conservative speakers, the acoustic difference across the contrastive accent classes is substantially weaker in the speech of innovative speakers, for both noun stems and suffixes. Observation of individual differences in the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent and comparison with tonal patterns of Seoul Korean provide an insight into this sound change, offering evidence for how and why the acoustic distinction has weakened. This study thus documents a process of diachronic change in the prosody of Kyungsang Korean.