An Acoustical Study on the Syllable Structures of Korean Numeric Sounds

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study was to examine the syllable structures of ten Korean numeric sounds produced by ten students. Each sound was normalized by its maximum intensity value and divided into onset, vowel, and coda sections after finding abrupt or visible changes in energy values or cumulative values of lower spectral energy at each pulse point using four Praat scripts. Then, segmental durations and cumulative intensity values of each syllable were obtained to find a statistical summary of the syllable structure. Intensity values at 100 proportional time points were also collected to compare the ten sounds. Results showed as follows: Firstly, there was not much deviation from the grand average duration and intensity for the majority of the sounds except the two diphthongal sounds on which their boundary points varied among the speakers. Secondly, the onset point for the CV or CVC category sounds and the boundary between the vowel and the nasal or lateral sound were easy to identify, which may be automatically traced later. Thirdly, there seems some tradeoff among the sections maintaining the same total duration per each syllable. Further studies on syllables with various onsets or codas would be desirable to make a general statement on the Korean syllable structure.