Subglottal effects on the vowels across language: Preliminary study on Korean.
Youngsook Jung · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
Previous research suggested that subglottal resonances define vowel features [back] and [low] for English. In testing this hypothesis, we explored whether these vowel feature boundaries are independent of language. As preliminary research, we made recordings of speech and subglottal signals simultaneously for several adult Korean speakers. We found acoustic irregularities in F1 and F2 near subglottal resonances in Korean vowels. The boundary between [+low] and [−low] vowels agrees with speakers’ first subglottal resonances (SubF1), while the boundary between [+back] and [−back] agrees with SubF2. In addition, we tested which of these hypotheses is correct for a low vowel in Korean, which has only one low vowel with no contrast of [+back] and [−back]: (1) the low vowel is always [+back] or (2) SubF2 is avoided but the low vowel is front or back depending on adjacent consonants. The measurements of F2 and F2sub were obtained in the context /CaC/, where C is a consonant. We found that SubF2 was always avoided for the low vowel. If the adjacent consonants were labial or velar, F2 of the low vowel was below SubF2, whereas if the consonants were alveolar, F2 of the vowel was above SubF2. [Supported by NIH/NIDCD Grant No. #DC00075.]