The coarticulation of tones: An acoustic study of Thai.
| Number | 269 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1979 |
| Drawer | 5 |
| Entry Date | 06/03/1999 |
| Authors | Abramson, A. S. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | In T. L. Thongkum, P. Kullavanijaya, V. Panupong, & K. Tingsabadh (Eds.), Studies in Tai and Mon-Khmer phonetics and phonology in honour of Eugenie J. A. Henderson. Bangkok: Indigenous Languages of Thailand Research Project. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0269.pdf |
| Abstract | Phonemes occurring in a great number of phonetic environments are subject to so much coarticulatory perturbation that phoneticians and psychologists have speculated about the nature of the invariance to be found in any set of speech sounds said to manifest an underlying phonological entity (MacNeilage 1970). The question seem to have received relatively little attention in the matter of phonemic tones which have glottal repetition rate as their primary articulatory base. It is conceivable that in something as continuously variable as the pitch of the voice, the lexical tones undergo so much sandhi and other perturbations that the tone system is not fully preserved in running speech. Even if this is not so, are the ideal fundamental-frequency (fo) contours, epitomized by citation forms, preserved in a wide variety of contexts? Very little instrumental work on this topic has appeared in the literature. Examples are an investigation of Vietnamese by Han and Kim (1974) and a brief study of Thai by Palmer (1969). The language chose for this study is Central Thai (Siamese), which has five phonologically distinctive tones. In earlier work (Abramson 1962) ideal fo contours for these tones in citation forms were derived instrumentally and synthesized for perceptual validation. Although recent work (Erickson 1974) lends general support to the curves found, there is considerable disagreement over the preservation of these forms, as well as the full system of tonal contrasts, in running speech (Henderson 1949; Gandour 1975). Other attributes of the tones, such as glottalization and amplitude shifts, may be contextually induced, but they are not examined here. |
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