Acoustic evidence for incomplete neutralization of coda obstruents in Korean

Abstract

The phonetic manifestation of phonological contrast neutralization is of long-standing interest for our understanding of the phonetic realization of phonological structure. Korean phonology is particularly interesting in this regard with three dimensions of coda contrast neutralization: laryngeal, manner, and palatal. Extending previous work (Kim & Jongman, 1996) that documented complete neutralization of manner contrasts, the present study investigated all of the three types of coda neutralization in both spontaneous (orthography absent) and read speech (orthography present). The results revealed no acoustic differences between most pairs of coda obstruents subject to manner or palatal neutralization. However, laryngeal neutralization was phonetically incomplete with lenis codas (/p, t, k/) differing from their non-lenis counterparts (/pʰ, tʰ, k’/). In spontaneous speech, this was observed in preceding vowel duration, voicing into closure, and closure duration; in read speech, voicing into closure, closure duration, and release burst duration of a following consonant differed. Our new findings demonstrate that laryngeal coda neutralization in Korean is phonetically incomplete regardless of the presence or absence of orthography. As a case of neutralization beyond final devoicing, this study extends the empirical basis of linguistic theory, discriminating between the predictions of traditional theories versus more recent ones such as exemplar-based theory.