Temporal and Spectral Characteristics at the midpoint of Frication Noise in Korean Fricatives

Abstract

This paper examines the temporal and the spectral characteristics of the two Korean fricatives, /s/ and /s*/ in terms of fricative category, dialect, gender, age, and vowel context by measuring fricative duration and the four spectral moments. The study results show that fricative duration is the only robust cue to differentiate between the two dialects, but the four spectral moments do not play a role in distinguishing between the two dialects. The study indicates significant effects of fricative category and vowel context on the values of the four spectral moments as well as the fricative duration for the two Korean fricatives. Furthermore, among the four spectral moments, spectral mean and skewness show significant differences between age groups and gender groups, and variance is used to distinguish between the two genders. However, kurtosis does not serve as a distinctive cue for the speaker variability.