Korean learners have been said to have the characteristic pronunciation where the voiced plosives are devocalized in word initial position and the voiceless plosives prolonged as geminates in intervocalic position. This study examines the causes these characteristics focusing on the physiological factors such as intraoral air pressure and air flow rate. The Japanese words recorded have the syllable structure of /CVCVNCVN/ where the first and the second /C/ are either /t/ or /d/. The results obtained suggest that even though the acoustic measurements for the target segments indicate those of Korean tense plosives, their physiological data were found to be related with Korean aspirated plosives.
