Title : Development of pitch contrast and Seoul Korean intonation : A corpus study

This paper is an apparent-time study of a tonogenetic sound change and its effect on the intonational tonal pattern in Seoul Korean. The data were drawn from a speech corpus published by the National Institute of the Korean Language. The study examined 59 sentence-initial Accentual Phrases (AP) read by 118 speakers (born between 1932 and 1984) in the corpus. We measured mean pitch values of syllables in the target APs to investigate how the AP-initial pitch contrast and intonational patterns varied by age and gender. The results confirm previous findings that the AP-initial pitch difference between High-pitch inducing and Low-pitch inducing contexts increases in younger speakers, and pitch distinction in the AP-initial syllable extends further into later syllables of the same AP. The novel finding is that the size of APs and the intonational Low tone on the penultimate syllable affect the realization of the AP tonal pattern. The results also show that the enhancement of pitch distinction in non-initial syllables is greater for younger than older speakers, and also greater for females than males. In the discussion, we compare Seoul Korean to other languages that previously underwent tonogenesis. [189 words]