University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 6 Issue 3 Current Work in Linguistics Article 9 2000 The Laryngeal Effect in Korean: Phonology or Phonetics? Eon-Suk Ko University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl Recommended Citation Ko, Eon-Suk (2000) "The Laryngeal Effect in Korean: Phonology or Phonetics?," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 6 : Iss. 3 , Article 9. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol6/iss3/9 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol6/iss3/9 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Laryngeal Effect in Korean: Phonology or Phonetics? This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol6/iss3/9 The Laryngeal Effect in Korean: Phonology or Phonetics?* Eon-Suk Ko 1 Background It is well-known that voicing distinctions in prevocalic position can affect the fundamental frequency (FO) of following vowels (Hombert 1977, King ston & Diehl 1994, among others). Most of the literature on this issue, how ever, has dealt only with how the segmental effects of the binary voicing distinction between 'voiced' and 'voiceless' are different on the FO of the following vowel. The question arises how this effect would be realized in languages like Korean where obstruents with the same place of articulation can contrast in more than binary ways. Korean obstruents are generally grouped into three series, referred to as Ienis (/p, t, k, c, sf), aspirate (/ph, th, kh, chi) and fortis (/p', t', k', c', s'1).