• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.95-100
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• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to show their distinctive auditory cues. Until now research of acoustic characteristics has been confined to simple experiments concerning the restricted conditions. Therefore this paper examines all of the acoustic characteristics of the lax and tense Fricative Consonants and shows to how acoustic characteristics can be used to differentiate lax and tense Fricative Consonants. The results of this paper are (a) auditory cues are especially important if there is a large difference between acoustic characteristics, (b) the lax and tense Fricative Consonant's distinctive auditory cues contain a hierarchy, and (c) there is a different hierarchy between CV and VCV.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.53-68
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• 2000

Although Korean stops and affricates show a three-way contrast of phonemes into lax, tense and aspirated, Korean fricatives have only two types, so-called 'lax' and tense. Considering that all the other obstruents maintain a three-way distinction but fricatives, it might be interesting to investigate whether the lax fricatives are really 'lax' in their phonetic and phonological realizations, as assumed. From an acoustic analysis, I found that Korean lax fricatives had a heavy aspiration along with a high pitch for the following vowel, being more comparable to the aspirated category. By contrast, their durational properties were found to be short, or lax-like. In other words, Korean lax fricatives are phonetically neither lax nor aspirated, but both. This dual nature of the lax fricatives takes a better account of the fact that why lax fricatives are subject to tensification, but not aspiration phonologically. Is that simply because there is no aspirated fricative in Korean? I suggest that Korean lax fricatives undergo tensification because of their being short in duration, and that they are not subject to the aspiration rule because they are indeed aspirated sounds.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.169-184
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• 2002

Korean has two types of voiceless alveolar fricatives: a non-tense fricative /$S^{h}$ and a tense fricative /s'/. Twenty native speakers of Korean produced five pairs of isolated words containing word initial $S^{h}V$ and /s'V/ sequences where V was any one of five (/a, e, i, o, u/) of Korean vowels. Acoustic measures such as duration, fricative noise prominent frequency, energy change of following vowel, and fundamental frequency at vowel onset were examined. Results showed that among the parameters, aspiration noise duration of /s'/ in mid and low vowel contexts was less than 21 ms. In a perception experiment, where only the aspiration noise interval of the /$S^{h}$/ tokens was incrementally reduced, some listeners shifted perception from /$S^{h}$/ to /s'/.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.135-145
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• 1998

An Electropalatographic (EPG) study was conducted to investigate the articulatory characteristics which determine the, distinction between the Korean lax fricative [s] and tense fricative [s']. This study also intended to test if an increase in the degree of tensity (lax fricative [s] < tense fricative [s']) induces a decrease in coarticulatory vocalic effects. The results indicated that the increase in the tensity of Korean fricatives is closely related to the increase in the narrowness of the groove width (wider contact at the place of articulation), the forward shifting in the place of articulation, and the longer duration of the constriction (longer maintenance in the manner of articulation). It was also found that coarticulatory vocalic effects on Korean fricatives are affected by Recasens' two rules of constraint (1983) : spatial and temporal constraints.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.13-19
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• 2022

This study analyzed the pronunciations of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/ by 24 Japanese and 40 Korean speakers using the rise and steady+decay durations of their frication part in order to clarify the characteristics of their pronunciations. Discriminant analysis revealed that Japanese speakers' /s/ and /ts/ were well classified by the acoustic boundaries defined by a discriminant function. Using this boundary, Korean speakers' production of /s/ and /ts/ was analyzed. It was found that, in Korean speakers' pronunciation, misclassification of /s/ as /ts/ was more frequent than that of /ts/ as /s/, indicating that both the /s/ and /ts/ distributions shift toward short rise and steady+decay durations. Moreover, their distributions were very similar to those of Korean fricatives and affricates. These results suggest that Korean speakers' classification error might be because of their use of Korean lax and tense fricatives to pronounce Japanese /s/, and Korean lax and tense affricates to pronounce Japanese /ts/.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.71-87
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• 2004

Korean has a pair of voiceless fricatives, whose laryngeal manifestation comes in parallel to stops and affricates with a three-way lexical contrast. Prior phonetic studies by Kagaya (1974), Iverson (1983), and Kang (1999, 2000) point out /s/ is associated with multiple characteristics of the larynx shared with not only the lax but also the aspirated series, whereas /s' / carries a laryngeal distinction typical of the tense consonants. The complex dual nature of /s/ is again supported by a psycholinguistic study by Kang (2004), as /s/ was found to interact with /$c^h$/ (17% of the time) as well as /c/ (57%) in speech errors. In addition, a recent work by Cho and Lee (2003) notes an interesting chain shift case in the acquisition of the fricatives. Although they observed a significant phonological pattern between child English and Korean, Cho and Lee's description of acquiring fricatives is far from being precise from the perspective of phonetics. From a longitudinal study of recorded tapes by two children at 1;7-3;8 and 1;7-2;1 respectively, I found that /s' / was usually substituted into tense noncontinuants in young children's early production as predicted, whereas /s/ having both lax and aspirated-like glottal properties revealed a complicated pattern of substitutions into lax, tense, and aspirated noncontinuants with a varying degree of preference relative to the subjects. The current acquisition study supports the previous claims concerning fricatives in other languages, showing that their acquisition comes after stops. Besides, it also notes that Korean fricatives are subject to a series of phonological processes called stopping, affricating, tensifying and palatalizing during the transitional period of phonological development by young children. Moreover, between the two voiceless types, /s/ was acquired earlier than /s'/ as the unmarked segment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.37-46
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• 2010

This study investigates acoustic characteristics of English and Korean voiceless sibilant fricatives as they appear before the three vowels, /i/, /$\alpha$/ and /u/. Three measurements - duration, center of gravity and major spectral peak - are employed to compare acoustic properties and vowel effect for each fricative sound. This study also investigates the question of whether Korean sibilant fricatives are acoustically similar to the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ or to the palato-alveolar /$\int$/. The results show that in the duration of frication noise, English /$\int$/ is the longest and Korean lax /s/ the shortest of the four sounds. It is also observed that English alveolar /s/ has the highest value, whereas Korean /s/ shows the lowest value in the frequency of center of gravity. In terms of major spectral peak, while English /s/ reveals the highest frequency, English /$\int$/ shows the lowest value. In addition, evidence indicates that there is a strong vowel effect in the fricative sounds of both languages, although the vowel effect patterns of the two languages are inconsistent. For instance, in the major spectral peak, both Korean lax /s/ and tense /$s^*$/ show significantly higher frequencies before the vowel /$\alpha$/ than before the other vowels, whereas both English /s/ and /$\int$/ exhibit significantly higher frequencies before the vowel /i/ than before the other vowels. These results indicate that Korean sibilant fricatives are acoustically distinct from both English /s/ and /$\int$/.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2024

This study investigated acoustic features in spectral moment analysis, comparing accurate articulations with distortions of alveolar fricatives such as dentalization, palatalization, and lateralization. A retrospective analysis was conducted on speech samples from 61 children (mean age: 5.6±1.5 years, 19 females, 42 males) using the Assessment of Phonology & Articulation for Children (APAC) and Urimal-test of Articulation and Phonology I (U-TAP I). Spectral moment analysis was applied to 169 speech samples. The results revealed that the center of gravity of accurate articulations was higher than that of palatalization, while palatalization was lower than dentalization. The variance of dentalization was higher than that of both accurate articulations and palatalization. The skewness of dentalization was higher than that of accurate articulations, and the skewness of palatalization was higher than that of accurate articulations. The kurtosis of palatalization was higher than that of both accurate articulations and dentalization. No significant differences were observed for the position of fricatives (initial, medial) and tense type (plain, tense) across all variables of spectral moment analysis for each distortion type. This study confirmed distinct patterns in center of gravity, variance, skewness, and kurtosis depending on the type of alveolar fricative distortion. The objective values provided in this study will serve as foundational data for diagnosing alveolar fricative distortions in children with speech sound disorders.