Acoustic characteristics of coronal fricatives in Seoul Korean

Abstract

This study presents a detailed acoustic characterization of the contrast between the two voiceless coronal fricatives of Korean, variously described in the literature as a lenis/fortis or aspirated/fortis contrast. In utterance-initial position, the fricatives were found to differ in centroid frequency, frication duration, aspiration duration, following vowel duration, and several aspects of the following vowel onset, including intensity profile, spectral tilt, and F1 onset. Between-fricative differences varied across vowel environments, and spectral differences in the vowel onset especially were more pronounced for /a/ than for /i, ī, u/. However, differences between the fricatives in ƒ0 onset consistently failed to be found. Taken together, the acoustic data showed that the `non-fortis' fricative resembles both the lenis stops and the aspirated stops of Korean in a principled way: properties related to articulatory tension are similar to those of the lenis stops, while properties related to glottal width are similar to those of the aspirated stops. Given this dual patterning, it is argued that the `non-fortis' fricative is best characterized not in terms of the lenis or aspirated categories for stops, but in terms of a unique representation that is at once both lenis and aspirated.