Syllable-internal corrective focus in Korean.

In producing linguistic prominence, certain linguistic elements are highlighted relative to others in a given domain; focus is an instance of prominence in which speakers highlight new or important information. This study investigates prominence modulation at the sub-syllable level using a corrective focus task, examining acoustic duration and pitch with particular attention to the gestural composition of Korean tense and lax consonants. The results indicate that focus effects are manifested with systematic variations depending on the gestural structures, i.e. consonants, active during the domain of a focus gesture, that the patterns of focus modulation do not differ as a function of elicited focus positions within the syllable. The findings generally support the premise that the scope of the focus gesture is not (much) smaller than the interval of (CVC) syllable. Lastly, there is also some support for an interaction among prosodic gestures-focus gestures and pitch accentual gestures-at the phrase level. Overall, the current findings support the hypothesis that focus, implemented as a prosodic prominence gesture, modulates temporal characteristics of gestures, as well as possibly other prosodic gestures that are co-active in its the domain.