This study investigates focus and boundary effects on Korean nasal consonants and vowel nasalization. Under focus, nasal consonants lengthen in CVN# but shorten in #NVC, enhancing [nasal] vs [oral]. Vowels resist nasalization under focus, enhancing [oral]. Domain-initial nasal consonants denasalize, exercising no coarticulatory influence. Domain-final nasal consonants shorten counter to expectation, although vowel nasalization increases. Comparison with English data reveals similarities (focus-induced coarticulatory resistance) despite cross-linguistic differences in marking prominence, but it also suggests that prosodic-structural conditioning of non-contrastive vowel nasalization, albeit based on phonetic underpinnings of coarticulatory process, is fine-tuned in language-specific ways, resulting in cross-linguistic variation.

This study investigated articulation of preboundary lengthening (PBL) in tri-syllabic pseudo words (bábaba, babába, bababá) in American English. Results from 10 speakers showed that PBL was modulated by the degree of prominence, i.e., the less prominent, the more PBL. PBL was attracted to the penultimate stressed syllable but only when the word received no pitch accent whereas the antepenultimate syllable showed no PBL. Kinematically, PBL was accompanied by a larger movement along with an increase in peak velocity, showing a kind of boundary-related articulatory strengthening, although there was some evidence of temporal expansion possibly due to lowered stiffness.

말소리와 음성과학(Phonetics and Speech Sciences)

This electromagnetic articulography study explores the kinematic profile of Intonational Phrase boundaries in Seoul Korean. Recent findings suggest that the scope of phrase-final lengthening is conditioned by word- and/or phrase-level prominence. However, evidence comes mainly from head-prominence languages, which conflate positions of word prosody with positions of phrasal prominence. Here, we examine phrase-final lengthening in Seoul Korean, an edge-prominence language with no word prosody, with respect to focus location as an index of phrase-level prominence and Accentual Phrase (AP) length as an index of word demarcation. Results show that phrase-final lengthening extends over the phrase-final syllable. The effect is greater the further away that focus occurs. It also interacts with the domains of AP and prosodic word: lengthening is greater in smaller APs, whereas shortening is observed in the initial gesture of the phrase-final word. Additional analyses of kinematic displacement and peak velocity revealed that Korean phrase-final gestures bear the kinematic profile of IP boundaries concurrently to what is typically considered prominence marking. Based on these results, a gestural coordination account is proposed, in which boundary-related events interact systematically with phrase-level prominence as well as lower prosodic levels, and how this proposal relates to the findings in head-prominence languages is discussed.

Vowel glottalization, as voice quality variation, occurs at phrase edges or under prominence, often in conjunction with resolving onsetless syllables or vowel-vowel hiatus. This study examines whether and how voice quality in two varieties of English, American and Australian, is manifested at phrase edges and under prominence in vowels that are neither strictly initial nor final. Analyses of spectral and noise measures show that both varieties utilize voice quality to signal prominence and boundaries, even in non-edge contexts. Specifically, increased glottalization reflects stronger laryngeal articulation in line with domain-initial and prominence-induced strengthening. Conversely, phrase-final positions are characterized by phrase-final creak, which is often observed with phrase-final weakening. While both varieties show similar vowel glottalization usage, Australian English tends to use voice quality more extensively to mark focus than American English, with a greater overall tendency toward glottalization. This suggests that the impressionistic difference perceived in the general use of voice quality between the varieties (more robust glottalized vowels in Australian English) stems from differences in the use of glottalization in marking prosodic structure. These findings underscore the role of non-contrastive voice quality in shaping prosodic structure across varieties while also revealing dialect-specific interactions between phonetics and prosody in its manifestation.

This article presents acoustic data on coarticulatory vowel nasalization from the productions of twelve L1 Korean speakers and of fourteen Korean learners of L2 English. The dataset includes eight monosyllabic target words embedded in eight carrier sentences, each repeated four times per speaker. Half of the words contain a nasal coda such as p*am in Korean and bomb in English and the other half a nasal onset such as mat in Korean and mob in English. These were produced under varied prosodic conditions, including three phrase positions and two focus conditions, enabling analysis of prosodic effects on vowel nasalization across languages along with individual speaker variation. The accompanying CSV files provide acoustic measurements such as nasal consonant duration, A1-P0, and normalized A1-P0 at multiple timepoints within the vowel. While theoretical implications have been discussed in two published studies, the full dataset is published here. By making these data publicly available, we aim to promote broad reuse and encourage further research at the intersection of prosody, phonetics, and second language acquisition—ultimately advancing our understanding of how phonetic patterns emerge, transfer, and vary across languages and learners.