Many studies have been made on the masticatory and esthetic effects of prosthodontic treatments, but few on the restoration of pronunciation, especially in complete denture wearers. The purpose of this study is to provide a basis that could be of help to the complete denture wearers’ speech adaptation by analyzing the influence of the palatal coverage upon the duration of consonants and vowels with the method of experimental phonetics. For this study, metal plates and resin plates were made for 3 male subjects in their twenties, who have good occlusion, and do not have speech and hearing disorders. Then 8 Korean consonants and 4 Korean vowels were selected, systemically considering phonetic variants such as the place and manner of articulation, lenis/fortis, mutual effect of each phoneme, etc. they were combined into meaningless tested works in the form of /VCV/, and were included in the carrier sentences. Each informant
uttered the resin plate. The recorded data were analyzed through the waveform of sounds and spectrogram by using the program SoundEdit, Signalize, Statview512+for the Macintosh computer. The duration of each segment was measured by searching for the boundaries between the preceding vowels and consonants, and between the consonants and the following vowels. @ES The study led to the conclusion that: @EN 1. With the palatal plate, the duration of all the tested words increased and the duration increased more with the resin plate than with the metal plate. 2. With the palatal pate, the duration of all the preceding vowels, consonants, and following vowels increased, but the temporal structure of the tested words was maintained. 3. As for the manner of articulation, fricative /s(ㅅ)was greatly influenced by both kinds of palatal plates. 4. As for the place of articulation, alveolar sounds /d/(ㄷ), /n/(ㄴ) were greatly influnced by the kinds of palatal plates, and the velar sounds /g/(ㅇ), /g/(ㄱ) were influenced by the platal plates, but the kind of the palatal plates did not show any significance. 5. As for the lenis/fortis, lenis was influenced more by the kind of the palatal plates. 6. As for the influence of vowels upon each segment in the tested words, palatal vowel /i/(ㅣ) had greater influence than pharyngeal vowel /a/(ㅏ), and following vowels than preceding vowels.
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