Acoustic Study on Korean Alveolar Fricatives Produced by Jeju Korean Speakers

Abstract

The Korean language distinguishes between two types of fricatives, namely lax and tense fricatives. In previous work, acoustic measurements on the Korean fricatives have been done in limited vowel context and word position. This study provides acoustic measurements of Korean fricatives at both word- initial and word- medial positions before the vowels /i/, /a/ and /u/ repsectively, produced by the Jeju dialect speakers of Korean. Four measurements - VOT, fricative duration, COG and F0- are employed to compare acoustic characteristics and vowel effect for each fricative sound. The results show that since /s*/ is longer and higher than /s/ for fricative duration and COG respectively, these two play acoustic cues in distinguishing factors between the two fricatives. For the vowel effect, both fricative duration and COG are the best predictors for all types of fricatives. Clear differences are observed among the acoustic characteristics for the fricatives in different word positions and vowel contexts