The development of monophthongal vowels in Korean: Age and sex differences

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to acoustically examine the developmental characteristics of fundamental (f₀) and formant frequencies (F1 and F2) in vowels produced by Korean male and female children in two age ranges (5 and 10 years of age). The study also compared formant frequency values among Korean children with those from existing English data. Results revealed that f₀ and F1 and F2 decrease as age increases. The f₀ was similar, but formant frequencies were found to differ between male and female children. In particular, F1 and F2 values differed for the low‐central vowel /a/ among the four Korean groups, similar to English‐speaking children, but, unlike English, F2 values of front vowels were not different between age groups in Korean. The results of this study provide a base of information for establishing the normal pattern of development in Korean children, and bear on the exploration of cross‐linguistic similarities and differences in vowel development between English and Korean.

• Korean
• vowel development
• acoustic analysis

Notes

1. This study made indirect comparisons between Korean and English children in that consonant contexts were not considered when the vowels were compared. Vowel space variation could be due to this context difference as well as to dialectal differences among the speaker populations of the studies (Lee et al., 1999). Further study should collect child speech in the same consonant contexts in order to obtain more precise measurements of vowel formant values between Korean and English.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.