Abstract
Korean allows combinations of consonant and glide (CG) at onset position but forbids obstruent+liquid (OL) clusters. This is a potential problem for the universal sonority dispersion principle, which can be avoided if the Korean CG combinations are secondary‐articulated consonants rather than clusters. To see if this hypothesis is phonetically supported, we compared Korean with Spanish, which allows both CG and OL onsets. F2 at the vocoid onset of (C)jV syllables varied as a function of the backness of the following vowel in Korean, whereas it stayed constant in Spanish. The vocoid duration increase from CV to (C)jV was also smaller in Korean. This shows that the Korean /j/ is weak in that it lacks a target frequency and its tongue position is decided by the following vowel. However, this property is not confined to the Cj combination, as CjV and jV syllables behaved in the same way. Our results thus support the idea that the Korean CG is close to secondary‐articulated consonants, but the weak realization of /j/ is not a contextual variation after a consonant. One possible explanation for this pattern may come from the inherent property of CV coarticulation in Korean.
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