모음의 무성화와 비실현

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenon in which Korean high vowels are realized without vocal fold vibration in specific consonantal environments. Focusing on their acoustic realization patterns, such vowel forms are examined in terms of two possible interpretations: devoiced realization and vowel non-realization. Based on actual speech data, the study analyzes the frequency of voicing absence in high vowels ‘ㅣ’, ‘ㅡ’, and ‘ㅜ’ following various types of syllable-initial consonants—namely lenis, aspirated, alveolar fricatives, and laryngeal fricatives—and evaluates distributional tendencies and statistical significance across conditions. The following consonantal environment is likewise categorized into lenis, aspirated, alveolar fricative, and sonorant types. The results show that high vowels are most frequently realized without vocal fold vibration when followed by aspirated consonants; the effect of preceding consonants was also statistically significant. Among the high vowels, ‘ㅡ’ and ‘ㅜ’ exhibited a significant interaction effect between syllable-initial consonants and following consonants. Notably, in the case of vowels following the alveolar fricative ‘ㅅ’, although the overall syllable duration was shorter, no significant difference was observed in the combined duration of the frication and aspiration segments, suggesting a high likelihood of vowel non-realization. In contrast, in contexts where vowels followed lenis or aspirated stops, the aspiration duration of the preceding consonants was significantly lengthened when vowel voicing was absent, indicating that the vowel may have been realized in a devoiced form. These findings suggest that the surface absence of vocal fold vibration in vowels may result from fundamentally different phonetic mechanisms depending on the articulatory properties of adjacent consonants. These findings demonstrate that the seemingly identical absence of vocal fold vibration can be interpreted differently depending on the articulatory properties of the consonants.