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“The Prosodic Substrate of Consonant and Tone Dynamics”
by Yoonjeong Lee
May 2018
This dissertation investigates the complex interaction in the prosodic dynamics of consonant and tone, probing an essential role of phrasal prosody in spoken language production. The overarching hypothesis is that the local phonetic organization of a consonant system is regulated and shaped by the language’s prosodic structure. The test language used to investigate this hypothesis is contemporary Seoul Korean. The two empirical studies presented here examine the segmental and tonal sensitivity to the unique phrasal prosodic system of this language, in which relatively fixed phrase tone patterns are co-active with its segmental tone patterns. Our systematic analysis of the global tonal structure demonstrates its interaction with the local phonetic distinctions of contrastive categories in this language—specifically, its three-way voiceless stop contrast. The acoustic and articulatory investigations in this dissertation provide an explanation for how phonological factors combine to shape the phrasal tone realization; these studies systematically illuminate the patterning of phonetic information for sequences containing varying consonant types [tense/lax] placed across several phrasal positions. Overall, both general cross-speaker patterns and individual speaker-specific patterns suggest that constraints for preserving paradigmatic and syntagmatic contrasts are simultaneously present and active in the phonology of younger speakers of Seoul Korean. The articulatory study with the real-time magnetic resonance imaging technique provides novel evidence for (a) articulatory mechanisms that express consonantal tenseness and tone and (b) the interplay between different phonological structures that deploy these mechanisms. Finally, this dissertation sheds light on some salient issues in sound change using the current findings as unique examples of variation and sound change in progress. The observed patterns of an ongoing tonogenic sound change are systematically influenced by higher-level phrasal prosodic contexts. Moreover, our results regarding the progression of the sound change across prosodic contexts suggest a further interaction of phrasal prosody with lexical word boundary in terms of information reorganization. Our findings have implications for an understanding of the complex role that prosodic conditioning can play in sound change. Taken together, this dissertation provides novel evidence for the seamless integration of segmental and suprasegmental phonological structure and contributes to our understanding of the complex orchestration of articulatory gestures as they are woven into the prosodic substrate of spoken language.