Abstract
The Seoul dialect of Korean has three types of plosives and africates: lax, tense and aspirated. Kim et al. (2002) pointed out that low F0 gives the cue of lax against tense and aspirated. In this paper I measured the height of F0 of syllables relative to the immediately preceding syllable in one-, two- and three-syllable-nouns (relative to the final syllable of the word preceding one-syllable nouns.) By this method, F0 variation of each utterance is neutralized and we can see clearly a high / low F0 difference on the first syllable: always lower than the preceding syllable if its onset is lax; always higher if its onset is tense or aspirated. Moreover, the height of the second and third syllables are determined by the height of the first syllable. The onset of the syllable, either nasal or vowel, is also lower, while the fricative-onset is higher, even though these consonants have no counterparts distinguished by F0 height. This suggests that the Seoul dialect has a non-distinctive tone pattern with a high / low F0 parameter on the first syllable of words.
