Acoustic Space, Duration and Formant Patterns in vowels of Bangkok Thai

Acoustic space is a useful tool which shows how the formant frequencies help objectively define the vowel space in a language. The present study revalidates the use of an empirically verifiable, quantifiable concept of acoustic space which also helps us revisit the DT Hypothesis and Quantal Theory. Through this study the authors show how relative positioning of vowels in vowel space is more important and useful a marker for an individual speaker or a language or even a linguistic region than formant values of individual vowels. Since the data collected for the present study comes from a tone language, the authors also examine the correlations, if any, between spectral characteristics, duration and pitch/ phonemic tones in Thai language. Some interesting correlations emerge which need to be examined with data from more tonal languages, as well as non-tonal languages.

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