Laryngeal movements in the production of Korean stop consonants

International audienceIn Korean, as in some Asian languages, syllable final stops are often produced without a perceptually salient burst due to a non-audible release of the occlusion (Edmondson et al., 2010) and are called unreleased stops (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Although this tendency is phonologicallywell described as the result of a lenition process (Cho et al., 2002), it is still not well understood phonetically. The aim of our study is to describe the production process of Korean non-release stops taking into account laryngeal and supralaryngeal articulations and in particular to test thehypothesis of a laryngeal action that would contribute to a decrease in air pressure behind the occlusion causing a non-audible release (Tran et al., 2021). Using an auxiliary of the EVA-2* connected to an electroglottograph EG2-PCX2, we recorded the vertical movement of the larynx andthe signal of the vocal fold oscillations in synchronization to the audio recording of the acoustic signal. Twenty-one Korean native speakers (10 male speakers, 11 female speakers) participated in the experiment. The corpora consist of 3 repetitions of 34 monosyllabic and disyllabic words insertedin a carrier sentence. A systematic lowering of the larynx accompanies productions of /p, t, k/ with differences in amplitude movement between onset and coda positions and between male and female speakers was observed. Results also suggest that Korean unreleased stops are not glottalized