Seunghun Lee

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at International Christian University

This research investigates the tone system of an understudied language, Du’an Zhuang and its interaction with duration. Cross-linguistically, tones tend to be less complex in shorter duration contexts. In Du’an Zhuang, syllable type provides these contexts: There are six contrastive tones among unchecked syllables with longer rhyme duration, but th...

While liquids such as /l/ or /r/ are common across languages, these series of sounds have intriguing voicing contrasts in several Tibeto-Burman languages. The voiceless liquids are either preceded or followed by a period of aspiration, which provides a distinctive cue for the identification of these sounds. However, research on the features of thes...

Aspirated fricatives are typologically rare in the world’s languages. Building upon characteristics of aspirated fricatives in Korean, this paper examines the phonetics of aspirated fricatives in Jinghpaw and Burmese. Our results show that the duration of aspiration in Jinghpaw and Burmese ranges from about 10 to 20% of the entire fricative duratio...

Voiceless nasals in Drenjongke (Bhutia), a Tibeto-Burman language, are innovative segments that display variable realizations, not found in neighboring languages. In this paper, we present novel acoustic data that allows to identify four distinct phonetic realization patterns for voiceless nasals. Building upon the gestural model (Browman and Golds...

The exclusive particle tu ‘only’ in contemporary Zanzibar Swahili shows the distribution and prosodic patterns different from Ashton (1944) and Wilson (1985). This paper reports prosodic patterns of this exclusive particle tu in final and post-verbal positions produced in statements and questions and shows that tu is predominantly produced with the...

This paper aims to provide a typological overview on the group-internal variation of lateral fricatives in selected southern Bantu languages. Based on phonetic observations about attested realisations in sample languages and their distributional patterns, we propose several hypothetical principles that explain observable variations, which include o...

This paper reports how question elements (wh-words and question particles) of two distinct Bantu languages are prosodically realized. Shingazidja (the Comorro islands) and Xitsonga (South Africa) are distantly located, but their tonal and prosodic grammars are comparable. Even so, question elements do not behave in a comparable manner. Wh-words in...

Phonetic typology of laryngeal contrasts in plosives is explored. A corpus based on recordings of plosives in 103 languages are analyzed based on the number of laryngeal contrast in plosives: languages show a two-way, a three-way, a four- way contrast, or no laryngeal contrast. The recordings come from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Al...

Nuosu Yi, a Tibeto-Burman language, has a tone sandhi pattern, where a lexical [ ³³ ] -tone is realized as [ ⁴⁴ ]-tone on the surface. This tone sandhi pattern in Nuosu Yi is described as having a “weak phonological status ( Gerner, 2013 : 28)”. In this study, we confirm this observation and further show the role of phonological length in the tone...

Xitsonga, a southern Bantu language (S53) spoken in South Africa, possesses rich phonological patterns that have been underreported in the literature. This paper aims to provide an overview of the phonology of Xitsonga with a focus on segmental phonology, building up on existing literature. The consonants of Xitsonga show a four‐way laryngeal syste...

Objectives This study aimed to examine age-related differences in the comprehension of Korean comparative sentences with varying word orders by employing both offline and online measures, and to investigate how variations in word order affect sentence processing across different age groups. Methods A total of 52 monolingual native Korean speakers,...

Geminates are a feature of Sesotho phonology. Only nasals and the lateral appear as geminates, to the exclusion of the other sonorants that form part of the Sesotho phonemic inventory. This squib reports on some phonetic and phonological aspects of Sesotho geminates, including duration, the phonotactic distribution of geminates and the syllabic str...

A production study of the Korean three-way contrast of tense, lenis and aspirated obstruents was conducted that included all manners. In this paper, psychoacoustic roughness as a measure of laryngeal constriction was used to explore the phonetic acoustic properties of tense obstruents. Because it is a perceptual attribute, it may have stronger corr...

This paper reports the focus realization of internal elements within Japanese complex DPs with two modifying adjectives and a head noun, building on previous work on focus by varying modifier type, focus position, and accent patterns. Six native speakers of Japanese were recorded producing accented and unaccented complex DPs with focus on either ad...

Rakugo is a Japanese performance art form where a solo performer delivers a story with comedic parts, often altering their voice when they produce a speech style unique to Rakugo. This paper compared the phonetic patterns of Rakugo-style speech and natural speech produced by 8 Rakugo performers (called Hanashika). An analysis of 32 bi-or tri-syllab...

Prosodic patterns of the exclusive particle TU in Swahili polar interrogatives are examined. TU is realised with a pitch boost and appears in both sentence-final and non-final positions. Interrogatives overall display sentence-final falling intonation, resulting in a prosodic mismatch with sentence-final TU. We recorded 30 stimuli sentences with 4...

Machine learning via random forest was used to model learning of the laryngeal contrast of Korean obstruents. The model was trained on eight acoustic landmarks: f0, VOT, spectral tilt, psychoacoustic roughness and duration measures of closure and frication. The release duration (frication and aspiration) and aspiration duration of affricates and fr...

This paper explores the prosodic patterns of complex DP structures in Xitsonga by looking at penultimate lengthening in DPs with marked and unmarked word orders of different types. We discuss the underlying syntactic structures and prosodic realizations of Xitsonga DPs. We are particularly interested in the way in which recursion applies in the Xit...

We describe and analyze a novel pattern of locative inversion, passivization, and object clitics in Xitsonga, a Bantu language of South Africa. We note that, unlike in most Bantu languages, locative inversion can take place with intransitives, transitives with active voice, and transitives with passive voice. While subject marking is obligatory, ob...

We feel both honoured and humbled to present this volume to Laura Downing on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Gothenburg in June 2021 which has appeared in two parts with issue 1 of volume 62 published in 2021 and issue 2 of volume 62 published in 2022.

This study examines articulatory and acoustic data in order to investigate the non-coalescence of /h/ in South Jeolla. Seoul Korean speakers produce /pap/ “rice” followed by /hana/ “one” as [pa.p h a.na] with the coalescence of /p/ and /h/; this is called an aspiration merger. In South Jeolla Korean, this merger may be blocked, as in cases where sp...

This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, of which some look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention pai...

This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, of which some look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention pai...

This book is a collection of chapters that describe topics of Kirundi grammar based on sessions with a speaker of Kirundi from summer 2021 to early 2022. The first Kirundi sessions were held to better understand the patient inversion structure. Baselines for the sessions were formed by eliciting lexical items. Kirundi segments focusing on the vowe...

This replication study examines the comprehension of Japanese sentence types using methods developed for investigating Korean sentence comprehension in Sung et al. (2017) and Sung (2015). Sung et al. (2017) found the effects of age, word order, and working memory when participants perform a sentence comprehension task. Sung (2015) focused on the se...

Under the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, higher education institutions have been required to develop effective crisis communication. This study investigates the communication strategies of 12 higher education institutions in the United States and Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic based on the situational crisis communi...

In 2020, COVID-19 spread infection around the world. In Japan, people were requested to stay at home to repress this pandemic. Due to this restriction to go out, ICU LINGLAB was forced to continue an experiment, which was fully conducted face-to-face at that time, in an online manner. The biggest difficulty in redesigning the experiment lay behind...

This study aimed to chronicle and understand the emergency online teaching experience of five faculty members in a liberal arts college located in Tokyo, Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, adopting the autoethnographic method. It explored the nature and dimensions of problems the faculty members faced, resources used to make sense of probl...

Bantu languages generally have a noun-initial DP word order but they typically allow for demonstratives, and in some languages also the quantifier meaning ‘each, every’, to precede the noun. Beyond this, Bantu languages generally allow changing the relative order of the post-nominal modifiers which leads to subtle (focus-related) changes in meaning...

This paper argues that the nativization of loanwords can result from pressure from morphology based on patterns of English loanword adaptations in Xitsonga, a southern Bantu language. The /s/ in /sC/ clusters of English is always realized in Xitsonga borrowings as [s] in non-initial positions, but the /s/ is realized with variations when it appears...

This squib reports acoustics of labial plosive in Kiribati, a Micronesian language spoken by about 100,000 people in the Republic of Kiribati, Nui in Tuvalu, Rabi island in Fiji and Gizo in the Solomon Islands. Kiribati orthography displays an asymmetry between labial and non-labials, in that the labial plosive is a voiced ‘b’, whereas the non-labi...

Hateruma Yaeyaman is an endangered southern Ryukyuan language spoken in the Hateruma island. In Hateruma, there is a limited distribution of strong aspiration in disyllabic words which is argued to be the result of a prosodic condition for a foot: all feet must have at least one heavy syllable. After presenting the distribution of strong aspiration...

Drenjongke or Bhutia is a Trans-Himalayan language spoken in Sikkim. This paper presents the phonetics of the sound system of Drenjongke. In consonants, devoiced plosives and voiceless nasals are described, and for the vowels nasalised vowels and vowel length are further described. After a succinct description of tone and syllable structures, a Dre...

The use of a psychoacoustic roughness model as a predictor of creaky voice is reported. We found that the roughness temporal profile of vocalic segments can predict the presence of creakiness in speech. Using a simple bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), we were able to predict the presence of creakiness in vocalic segments from only roug...

This paper can be downloaded from this link: http://id.nii.ac.jp/1130/00004539/

This paper analyzes the vocative truncation pattern in Korean from the viewpoint of Message-Oriented Phonology (MOP), which capitalizes on the idea that sound patterns are governed by a principle that makes message transfer effective. In the traditional naming pattern, Korean first names consist of a generation marker and a unique portion, and the...

The article can be downloaded from the following link: http://id.nii.ac.jp/1130/00004526/

This paper reports findings of a production study that examines the pronunciation of /tm/ and /tn/ sequences by Korean speakers of English. Korean L1 grammar has a post-lexical post-nasal assimilation process where the stop becomes a nasal when it is followed by a nasal. If the transfer of L1 grammar is dominant in the production of L2, post-nasal...

Dzongkha is the national language of Bhutan, but its phonetic nature has not been studied instrumentally in depth. This research note thus explores the phonetic structure of this language, focusing on its three aspects: (i) the vowel quality, (ii) the tonal contrast, and (iii) the four-way laryngeal contrast. The results show (i) that the first thr...

Language proficiency is identified as one of the most important factors for successful migrant integration. Japan has had a sizeable increase of migrants in the past few years, and these migrants needed to build their Japanese proficiency. Focusing on municipalities in the 23 Tokyo wards, we surveyed what types of Japanese as a Second Language (JSL...

Drenjongke is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Sikkim, India, whose phonetic properties are under-studied. This language is reported to have a four-way laryngeal contrast: aspirated, voiceless, voiced, and "devoiced" (van Driem 2016). An acoustic analysis of twelve Drenjongke speakers shows that in addition to differences in VOT, there are system...

Tamang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal and India. We report findings from a newly recorded set of data that adopts words from Mazaudon (1973, 2014) as well as Hyonjan (1993, 1997). Various dialects of Tamang have been described as a language with a four-way tonal contrast (Hari 1970, Mazaudon 1973, 1978, Mazaudon and Michaud 2008, Owen-...

All phonetics classes teach acoustic phonetics that requires that learners develop an understanding of various concepts such as voice onset time and formants, build skills to use Praat for analyzing data, and apply phonetic knowledge in understanding sound systems of understudied languages. This paper showcases three understudied languages for teac...

[[This paper can be downloaded from: https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/TAL_2018/pdfs/TAL_2018_paper_6.pdf]] Dränjongke is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Sikkim, India. The language has been described as having a two-way tonal contrast [1], but how the tonal contrast is realized phonetically has not been explored in detail.To fill this gap, w...

Chinese L2 learners of Japanese are identified as showing difficulties in the production of Japanese geminates. The idea of being difficult-to-listen is embodied in the concept Comprehensibility (Derwing & Munro 2015). This study first reviews the native pronunciation of Japanese singleton vs. geminate contrast. Then, we report findings based on th...

Creakiness of vocalic regions in White Hmong (a Hmong dialect with a three-way phonation contrast: modal, creaky and breathy tones) was measured with a state-of-the-art software predictor and with one based on an objective model of psychoacoustic roughness. Similar results for the two classifiers were found when comparing creaky vs. modal tones, bu...

We investigated the tonal systems of Wuming and Du’an Zhuang via a production study focusing on F0 and creaky phonation. Results revealed that (1) there is evidence of a phonation contrast among tones 2 and 4 in Wuming Zhuang and (2) no such phonation contrast exists in Du’an Zhuang, where F0 alone distinguishes each tone. The study utilized an obj...

The conjunctive and disjunctive forms in Xitsonga are examined with the purpose of presenting the distribution of these forms. While verbs in the conjunctive form are followed by some elements, the disjunctive is used when no element follows a verb. Xitsonga follows these basic patterns observed in other Bantu languages, but previous theories canno...

The use of psychoacoustic roughness as a predictor of creaky voice is reported. Roughness, a prothetic sensation elicited by rapid changes in the temporal envelop of a sound (15-300 Hz), shares qualitative similarities with a kind of phonation known as vocal fry or creakiness. When a creakiness classification made by trained linguists was used as a...

Depressor consonants in Xitsonga block high-tone spreading. These voiced obstruents and breathy voice consonants do phonetically lower pitch, but phonological blocking of H-tone spreading is not common. This paper reports new findings in which depressors allow H tone to spread into toneless words in Xitsonga, contrary to what we expect if depressor...

Some general questions about the role of constituency in sentence phonology and phonetics have informed research since Chomsky & Halle (1968) first put forward the hypothesis that the phonological representation of a sentence is in part a function of its syntactic representation.

Basaá [ɓà s ː] is spoken by 282,000 people in the forest area located in the South, Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon (based on 1982 Ethnologue record; Lewis 2009). Basaá is a narrow Bantu language in the Niger-Congo language family, and it is classified as A43 (Guthrie 1967–71, A43a in Maho 2009). The ISO code of Basaá is bas (Lewis 2009).

In Xitsonga, certain Aspectual Auxiliary verbs (AA verbs) appear with double subject agreement. While these AA verbs have been reported in the description of Xitsonga (Baumbach 1987: 250-252), a systematic morphosyntactic study of these constructions has not been undertaken. This study aims to fill this gap. An AA verb is marked with tense, aspect,...

This paper proposes a surface constraint against the phonotactic sequence [li] in Xitsonga. This constraint is supported by multiple lines of synchronic and diachronic evidence, individually identified in some previous work (Baumbach 1974,1987; du Plessis el al. 1995) and supported in our own data. We observe that a synchronic change of [l] to [r]...

In this paper we undertake an acoustic analysis of dental and alveolar segments in Mapudungun, an indigenous language of Chile. We calculate locus equations for dental and alveolar segment pairs of different manners. We find that dentals differ from alveolars of the corresponding manner in lowering the onset F2 of following vowels. We validate thes...

This paper proposes a surface constraint against the phonotactic sequence [ li] in Xitsonga. This constraint is supported by multiple lines of synchronic and diachronic evidence, individually identified in some previous work (Baumbach 1974, 1987 ; du Plessis et al. 1995) and supported in our own data. We observe that a synchronic change of / l/ to...

Fricated nuclei in Nuosu Yi were found to be more correctly described as fricated vowels, rather than syllabic fricatives due to the presence of clear formant structures typical of front vowels. In this exploratory study, two types of fricated nuclei were examined: retroflex "yr" and non-retroflex "y". The retroflex nucleus "yr" had higher F1 and l...

This paper presents phonological processes in Xitsonga diminutives. The round vowels /u/ and /o/ are changed into the glide [w] to avoid vowel hiatus. When the glide [w] is preceded by labial consonants, then other processes occur: either the labial nasal [m] corresponds to a velar, or the glide [w] deletes when preceded by labial obstruents. The s...

This article reports results from an investigation of domains of H tone spreading in Xitsonga, a southern Bantu language. High (H) tone spreads into toneless syllables but it spreads only to the first syllable if a nominal root has an H tone. Kisseberth (1994) argues that domain structures created by the Pre-High Projection rule account for the pat...

The present study examines the articulation and acoustics of the typologically rare and understudied 'whistled' fricative sound in Xitsonga, a Southern Bantu language. Using ultrasound imaging and video recording, we examine the lingual and labial articulation of the whistled fricative. For the acoustic analysis, we employ the multitaper spectral a...

Xitsonga nouns have plural prefixes that are added to a singular prefix-less root. These added prefixes (ADD) are described as being realized with a tone polar to the root vowel (RV): when RV is high (H) ADD is low (L), but when RV is L, ADD is H. Based on qualitative observations, Lee formally analyzes tonal polarity in a constraint-based framewor...

This explorative study reports how three types of comparative constructions in Mandarin Chinese, namely adjectival, adverbial and differential comparatives, are acquired by English learners in a college Chinese-language classroom. We start with a hypothesis that the syntactic structures of the adverbial comparative and the differential comparative...

There are three different types of comparatives in Nuosu Yi: adverbial comparatives, dimensional adjectival comparatives, and verbal comparatives. All of them can be used to express comparisons like John is taller than Peter. Their differences are related to the differential measure phrase (DMP). The adverbial comparatives do not allow DMPs, and th...

Xitsonga nouns display two types of plural formation. Plural prefixes can be added to a singular root (prefixation), or plural prefixes can take the place of singular prefixes (substitution). Tonal realizations differ in these two types, as the prefixation plurals show tonal polarity whereas the substitution plurals show paradigm uniformity effects...

Tonal development in Athabaskan languages from Proto-Athabaskan manifests in three different ways: (a) H tone marked languages, (b) L tone marked languages, and (c) non-tonal languages. This type of tonogenesis is argued to be due to the coordination problem (Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), in which misperception leads to the restructuring of grammar, which...

Mulao requires that syllables with onsets that are aspirates, glottals, voiceless sonorants and fricatives have high tone. These consonants phonologize in a way that input tone neutralizes when such consonants are onsets of these syllables. This paper argues that this requirement is due to the ranking, in which markedness constraints on consonant-t...