While eavesdropping on Japanese language study material that someone else in the household is playing, I keep hearing word-initial [ts] (or something similar, but definitely an affricate) instead of word-initial [s] (which I have been assured is the correct pronunciation).

Is there a process in Japanese which causes word-initial [s] to resemble [ts] after a glottal stop at a word boundary, before a voiceless vowel, or in some other environment?

#phonology #linguistics #japanese