The phonetic features of breathy voice and creaky voice : Consideration of application to lax, aspirated, and tense consonants in Seoul Korean

This study examines the validity of classifying lax, aspirated, and tense consonants as creaky voice or breathy voice. The difference in dB between the first and the second harmonic (H1-H2) has attracted attention as a substantial meausure for distinguishing between breathy voice and creaky voice. In previous studies, the measurement has only been employed for the vowel onset and mid point. Han (2013) showed that not only the vowel onset but the entire vowel serves as an important cue in the perceptual judgment of lax, aspirated,and tense consonants. Therefore, this study measured Hl-H2(in dB) at intervals oflO ms for the entire vowels in Seoul Korean following lax,aspirated,and tense consonants (/ta/t^ha/，/t'a/,/tsa/, /ts^ha/,/ts'a/,/sa/,/s'a/).The results of acoustic analysis found that it is possible to classify the tense consonants as creaky voice and the lax and aspirated consonants as breathy voice, as H2 is stronger than Hl in the vowel onset portion for the tense consonants. However, from that point on, H2 is stronger than Hl regardless of the consonant type, where there is no difference between consonants. Thus, it cannot distinguish between the crealcy voice and breathy voice.Furthermore, besides the phonetic features of Hl-H2, there is ambiguity in the definition of creaky voice, and some phonetic features of the tense consonant do not match with creaky voice. Thus，it is not appropriate to conduct the phonetic interpretation of the lax, aspirated, and tense consonants in Korean using the concept of breathy voice and creaky voice.