Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This study reexamines the place of articulation of Korean coronal affricates and its relationship to post-affricate yod-dropping. Drawing on historical phonology, loanword adaptation, acoustic production, and interlanguage perception, it argues that two restrictions coexist: a gradient, phonetically grounded constraint sensitive to perceptual contrast, and a generalized lexical ban on post-coronal /j/. Production data from Seoul, Toronto Heritage, Dandong, and Qingdao Korean show that northern Chinese Korean varieties have more anterior affricates, whereas Seoul and Toronto varieties generally exhibit more posterior realizations, with age- and gender-related variation. In a Japanese-to-Korean mapping task, speakers with anterior affricates more often represented posterior affricates using contrastive ⟨j⟩, while speakers with posterior affricates showed weaker differentiation. Loanword evidence likewise reveals greater tolerance of post-affricate ⟨j⟩ in varieties with anterior articulation. These findings support a dialect-sensitive, synchronically active connection between affricate place, perceptual distinctiveness, yod-dropping, and cross-linguistic adaptation, illuminating broader mechanisms of phonological change over time.