• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.103-116
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• 2003

This study examines whether gender influences voice cessation time (voicing duration) of lax (voiced) obstruents. Females more frequently show a posterior glottal opening throughout a vibratory cycle and have larger open quotients and less vocal fold contact than males. The gender differences imply that females can yield less voicing in their speech. In line with this, we hypothesized that the male voice is more voiced than the female voice in intervocalic lax (voiced) obstruents. This hypothesis was supported by the results of the present experiment, i.e., males exhibited significantly longer voicing and higher percentage of voicing relative to consonant duration than females during the intervocalic lax obstruents /p, t, k, c/ of Korean. Based on the results and the literature review, it is further hypothesized that the vocal folds are more likely adducted for males while abducted for females. The experimental data also indicated that males speak faster than females.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.21-33
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• 2000

There are two hypotheses with reference to voicing in Korean intervocalic lax stops /p, t, k/ and affricate /c/: (1) the phonologically voiceless lax stops /p, t, k/ and affricate /c/ are realised as voiced allophones in the intervocalic position; (2) the shorter the lax consonant, the higher the percentage of voicing. But the literature reveals that there are views rejecting or doubting them. To clarify these, an experiment was carried out, using a Sun Sparcstation, twelve native speakers of Korean and speech materials embedded in a sentence frame. The results showed that the extent of voicing in lax stops and affricate was too inconsistent to support the full voicing hypothesis, and shorter duration (faster speech) did not necessarily cause a higher percentage of voicing.

• MALSORI
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• no.spc1
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• pp.13-23
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• 2002

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2009

Duration of the preceding vowel is known to vary as a function of the (phonological or phonetic) voicing feature of the following consonant. This study raises a question against this general belief. A spectrographic experiment using 14 Korean obstruents (three sets of stops: /p, p', $p^h$/, /t, t', $t^h$/, /k, k', $k^h$/; one set of affricates: /c, c', $c^h$/; one set of fricatives: /s, s'/) reveals that (1) phonetic voicing in the intervocalic lax consonants /p, t, k, c, s/ has nothing to do with the duration of the preceding vowel; (2) vowel length is significantly shorter before tense consonants than before their lax cognates while tense consonants are significantly longer than their lax cognates. Importantly, Korean obstruents are all phonologically voiceless. Therefore, the voicing feature is rejected as the cause of preconsonantal vowel shortening in Korean both phonetically and phonologically. It is suggested that the temporal phenomenon is basically a kind of physiologically-motivated coarticulation though it is restricted by the phonology of a given language. To meet this assumption, the feature voicing should be replaced with the feature tenseness as the cause, which will enable us to explain the temporal phenomenon on the same basis irrespective of language.