한국어 후설 고·중모음에 대한 사회음성학적 연구

Abstract

The current study aims to investigate the effect of sociolinguistic factors such as region, generation and gender on the acoustic properties of Korean high and mid back vowels. We analyzed the vowel productions of one hundred twenty-eight subjects from the Korean Standard Speech Database, chosen to represent the different possible combinations of region, generation, and gender. The results reveal a chain-like shift in the back vowels. Unlike previous studies that have reported /o/-/u/ becoming closer as a result of a decreasing F1 in /o/, we found that the distance between the two vowels is decided more by the changing F2 in /u/. Also, the F2 of /u/ and /ɯ/, and the F2 of /ʌ/ and F1 of /o/ appear to move in tandem. Lastly, this study suggests that the reason the vowel changes differ across gender and regional dialects could be because they are all converging on to the standard Korean.