Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of two types of Korean fricatives called "lax" and "forced". The acoustic characteristics of each type were observed with a sound-spectrograph. Both types of the fricatives showed high frequency components higher than 5000Hz from the onset through the midpoint of their frictional period. At the end of the frictional period, the lax type showed frequency components as low as the F2 and/or F3 of the following vowel, while the forced type tended to retain higher frequency components. However, our data suggested this tendency alone might not differentiate these two fricatives. We observed the above acoustic characteristics in all the phonotactically possible environments that the two fricatives can occupy.
