Pronunciation of Standard Thai Vowels by Non-native Speakers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/jlapsu.2021.3Keywords:
acoustic study, second language learning, standard Thai vowelsAbstract
This study aimed to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Standard Thai vowels produced by Khmer, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Malay speakers. The test words comprised eighteen monophthongs /i e ɛ ɨ ə a u o ɔ ii ee ɛɛ ɨɨ əə aa uu oo ɔɔ/. The informants were composed of three speakers with high experience in Thai from each language and three speakers with low experience in Thai from each language, comprising a total of twenty-four speakers. The informants’ speech was recorded directly by a computer. The total number of test tokens for acoustical analysis was 2,592. Formant frequencies (F1 and F2) and duration of vowels were measured using the Praat program. The results showed that the acoustic characteristics of Thai vowels produced by Khmer, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Malay native speakers with high experience in Thai were better than those with low experience in Thai. Greater variation of vowels caused by tongue height position was found for speakers with low experience in Thai because high vowels, mid vowels, and low vowels are highly overlapped. For vowel length, almost all of the speakers with both high and low experience in Thai produced short and long vowels with duration ratios similar to native Thai speakers. However, vowel duration varied for speakers with low experience in the Thai language.
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