음성음운형태론연구 20집 3호 Um, Hye-Young

Um, Hye-Young. 2014. Phonetic realizations of /h/ after a sonorant in Korean. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology. 20.3. 357-377. 

In Korean /h/ is known to be optionally deleted between a voiced segment and a vowel or a glide. The current study investigates the phonetic realization of Korean /h/ occurring after a sonorant consonant, questioning the validity of complete /h/ deletion and raising the issue of possible influence of /h/ on the preceding sonorant. In the production experiment with two-syllable minimal pairs where one member contains a sonorant followed by /h/ and the other contains only a sonorant, such as /kamhi/ ‘dare’ and /kami/ ‘persimmon-nom’, it was found that the duration of the sonorant preceding underlying /h/ is shorter than that of the sonorant not followed by /h/ even when /h/ itself is not acoustically manifested. The results suggest that /h/ usually considered to be deleted in casual speech is in fact not completely deleted in the sense that it affects the preceding sonorant.