한국어 자음약화현상과 인접모음의 고저성

This study examined one of the hypotheses on the consonant reduction in Korean inferred from the Articulatory Phonology framework through phonetic experiments: Degree of consonant reduction depends on the height of the neighboring vowels--the lower the height of the neighboring vowel is, the higher the degree of reduction of stop closure period is. The results of this study, in general, turned out to support the hypothesis with some cases requiring other phonetic considerations, e.g., rate of some tongue tip movement in the case of dental lenis stop /t/ or the facts that bilabial lenis stop /p/ share its primary articulators, lips, with the neighboring vowel /u/ and that for bilabial closure, the upper lip lowers more for compensation of little movement of lower lip when its raising gets disturbed for some reasons.