A Phonetic Study of Korean Intervocalic Laryngeal Consonants

This paper aims at exploring a putative positional neutralization produced at the phonetics/phonology interface. It was designed to determine whether Korean intervocalic laryngeal consonants are phonetically distant from geminates, plain consonants, or laryngeal consonants in consonant clusters. It was found that the contrast between laryngeal singletons and geminates was neutralized intervocalically, and that both of these were patterned with heteroganic consonant sequences rather than with plain singletons.