Variation in the phonetic realization of Thai lexical tones across speaking styles.

Abstract

Thai is a tonal language with five contrastive tones: mid‐falling, low‐falling, high‐falling, high‐rising, and low falling‐rising. Previous literature has shown that the acoustic realization of Thai lexical tones, namely their fundamental frequency or F0, is affected by the phonetic contexts in which they are produced. For example, in connected, conversational speech, Zsiga [(2006)] found that F0 contours of Thai tones produced in phrase‐final position are different from those produced in non‐phrase‐final position. Context‐dependent variation in F0 contours among lexical tones in Thai was also noted in Luksaneeyanavin [(1983)]. The main aim of this research was to further investigate F0 variations across the five lexical tones in Thai. Ten native Thai speakers (5 males and 5 female) were asked to produce Thai words in two speaking styles: slow, careful reading style; and fast, conversational style. Preliminary analyses revealed that: (1) the high‐falling tone exhibited the highest degree of variation; (2) a greater amount of variation was observed among female speakers than among male speakers; and finally (3) a greater amount of variation was observed in open syllables than in closed syllables.