The Phonetic Realization of Stem-Final Consonant Clusters in Korean

유음으로 시작하는 어간말 중자음의 음성실현 양상

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the stem-final consonant clusters beginning with the liquid /ㄹ/ in Korean are realized in speech. Most scholars claim that the Korean stem-final consonant clusters are simplified and reduced to a stop consonant when pronounced. An attempt is made in this paper to verify the claim by conducting a series of listening tests and an acoustic analysis. The listening tests show that, contrary to the previous claims, some Koreans actually pronounce the stem-final consonant clusters as a whole. The result of the spectrographical study confirms our auditory observation. It has been found that the duration time taken by the stem-final consonant clusters is clearly longer when both consonants are pronounced than when only a liquid is pronounced. Similarly the vowel length of the previous syllable in the former is found to be longer in scale than the latter.