Perceptual cues for Korean tense and lax consonants

The present study investigates the perceptual cues for tense and lax consonants in Korean. The results indicate that closure duration is a primary cue to the perception of tense and lax stops in intervocalic position, but not in word-initial position.

In this position, VOT was found to be an important cue to the perception of these two categories. Contrary to expectations, burst amplitude does not play a role. These phonetic findings support the geminate analysis of tense consonants proposed by Han (1992), where intervocalic tense consonants occupy two timing slots and word-initial ones have only one.