INTERSPEECH 2009 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Brighton, United Kingdom September 6-10, 2009

Production Boundary Between Fricative and Affricate in Japanese and Korean Speakers

Kimiko Yamakawa (1), Shigeaki Amano (2), Shuichi Itahashi (1)

(1) National Institute of Informatics, Japan
(2) NTT Corporation, Japan

A fricative [s] and an affricate [ts] pronounced by both native Japanese and Korean speakers were analyzed to clarify the effect of the mother language on speech production. It was revealed that Japanese speakers have a clear individual production boundary between [s] and [ts], and that this boundary corresponds to the production boundary of all Japanese speakers. In contrast, although Korean speakers tend to have a clear individual production boundary, the boundary dose not corresponds to that of Japanese speakers. These facts suggest that Korean speakers tend to have a stable [s]-[ts] production boundary but that differ from Japanese speakers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Yamakawa, Kimiko / Amano, Shigeaki / Itahashi, Shuichi (2009): "Production boundary between fricative and affricate in Japanese and Korean speakers", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 468-471.