The coordination of boundary tones with constriction gestures in Seoul Korean, an edge-prominence language

Abstract

Boundary tones mark major phrase boundaries and are expected to be coordinated with speech gestures adjacent to boundaries. Research on Greek has indeed shown that the onset of the boundary tone (BT) gestures co-occurs with the gestural target of the phrase-final vowel. Interestingly, this coordination is modulated by lexical stress even in the absence of phrasal pitch accent. The present electromagnetic articulography study examines the coordination between BT and constriction gestures in Seoul Korean, a language with no lexical prosody and an edge-prominence system, and further investigates whether focus-related prominence affects this coordination. To this end, the distance of the prominent linguistic unit to the boundary is manipulated in a variety of ways. Results indicate that the onset of BT gestures in Korean is most proximate to the peak velocity of the phrase-final vowel gesture, but suggest that a c-center account is also viable. Prominence fine-tunes this coordination: BT gestures are initiated earlier in Intonational Phrases (IPs) with non-final focus as opposed to IPs with final focus. Importantly, this pattern is detected in short IP-final Accentual Phrases (APs), but not in relatively long IP-final APs. Based on these results, implications on the relationships between lexical and phrasal levels are discussed.