A CASE STUDY ON COMPARISON OF MALE AND FEMALE VOWEL FORMANTS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF KOREAN

Compared to the amount of research on Korean consonants, few studies indeed have been done to analyze Korean vowels. In addition, the results of recent studies are mixed. This study was conducted for reviewing the Korean vowel system. In this study, we measured the formant frequencies of eight Korean vowels by three Seoul dialect female speakers of Korean in their early 30s, and compared the results with those of two Korean males in their early 30s. We confirmed overlapped /e, /, /u, o / and /a, / formant frequencies uttered by female speakers, this was also the result of male speakers. These findings were similar to the results in the previous studies. Additionally vowel spaces of males have corresponded to the results indicated in previous studies. However the vowel spaces of females were different from the results of previous studies