phonological variations that occur naturally in spontaneous speech. The interests in variability of speech are not limited to the phonology but are expanding toward other areas of linguistics and speech-related fields. Speech data recorded in a studio by reading aloud a given script are gradually being replaced more and more by those recorded spontaneously in a natural setting without any script. The two types of recorded materials are equally important in pursuing various linguistic research goals. However, it is evident that the recordings from natural spontaneous speech contain more phonetic, phonological and sociolinguistic phenomena of the native speakers of a particular language than those from unnatural citation-form studio recordings. The Buckeye corpus of spontaneous speech[1] is a pioneering example of natural speech data. The 40 hours of recording from American talkers along with a search tool[2] are available for free to the research community and the corpus has been in the front line of changing the phonetic and phonological aspects of linguistic study in the world. In the same vein, Praat[3], the free software for doing phonetics by computer, has changed the way phoneticians do their work since its introduction to the linguistic research community.
This study examined the deletion of onset consonant in the word-internal structure in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. It used the dataset of speakers in their 20s extracted from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Yun et al., 2015). The proportion of deletion of word-internal onset consonants was analyzed using the linear mixed-effects regression model. The factors that promoted the deletion of onsets were primarily the types of consonants and their phonetic contexts. The results showed that onset deletion was more likely to occur for a lenis velar stop [k] than the other consonants, and in the phonetic contexts, when the preceding vowel was a low central vowel [a]. Moreover, some speakers tended to more frequently delete onset consonants (e.g., [k] and [n]) than other speakers, which reflected individual differences. This study implies that word-internal onsets undergo a process of gradient reduction within individuals' articulatory strategies.
A wh-phrase in an embedded sentence may have either an embedded or a matrix scope. Interpretation of a wh-phrase with a matrix scope has tended to be syntactically unacceptable unless the sentence reads with a wh-intonation. Previous studies have found two differences in prosodic characteristics between sentences with matrix and embedded scopes. Firstly, peak F0s in wh-phrases produced with an F0 compression wh-intonation are higher than those in indirect questions, and peak F0s in matrix verbs are lower than those in sentences with embedded scope. Secondly, a substantial F0 drop is found at the end of embedded sentences in indirect questions, whereas no F0 reduction at the same point is noticed in sentences with a matrix scope produced with a high plateau wh-intonation. However, these characteristics were not found in our experiment. This showed that a more compelling difference exists in the values obtained from subtraction between the peak F0s of each word (or a word plus an ending or case marker) and the F0s at the end of the word. Specifically, the gap between the peak F0 in a word composed with an embedded verb and the F0 at the end of the word, which is a complementizer in Korean, is large in embedded wh-scope sentences and low in matrix wh-scope sentences.
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