Consonantal Duration Affected by Phonological Contexts and Sociolinguistic Factors: A corpus study of the Korean affricate [tʃ*]

Abstract

Phonetic variation results from various linguistic factors such as lexical information and morphological features, among which phonological processing is often considered one of the primary source of phonetic variation due to the interplay between phonetics and phonology. Phonological processing in this study is defined as listeners’ incorporation of phonological knowledge during speech processing. In the present study, we explore how phonological contexts (canonical vs. derived) give rise to phonetic variation with specific regard to consonantal duration along with sociolinguistic features (gender and age groups). Phonologically canonical contexts refer to forms that are not altered by phonological processes, whereas phonologically derived contexts refer to forms that are modified by such processes. We found that the affricate appearing in phonologically derived contexts was significantly longer than that in canonical contexts, and that gender and age groups significantly interacted with phonological factors. The results suggest that speakers’ speech, modulated by phonological knowledge, partly leads to variation in consonantal duration.