Laryngeal Control in the Plosives of Standard Thai

Authors

Arthur S. Abramson

Publication Date

1989-01-01

Abstract

Much work has been done on the relevance of the timing of glottal pulsing relative to the occurrence of consonantal closure for phonemic distinctions between homorganic stops. In this paper, I have assembled old and new work on the plosives of Standard Thai, including the addition of data on the palatal affricates. In word-initial position, in both production and perception, the traditionally labeled voiced, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated stop consonants are well separated by voice onset time (VOT). The two palatal affricates are likewise so distinguished in production, although perceptual experiments have not yet been run for them. In word-final position, where there are no contrasts of voicing and aspiration, the only plosives that occur are the stops ; they show no voicing in their closures. A limited sampling of running speech indicates that, with some reduction of range, the distinguishing mechanism is quite robust. Temporal control of the laryngeal source, then, is sufficient to account for the three-way voicing distinction of Standard Thai.

DOI

10.58837/CHULA.PASAA.19.2.11

First Page

85

Last Page

93

Recommended Citation

Abramson, Arthur S. (1989) "Laryngeal Control in the Plosives of Standard Thai," PASAA: Vol. 19: Iss. 2, Article 12.
DOI: 10.58837/CHULA.PASAA.19.2.11
Available at: https://digital.car.chula.ac.th/pasaa/vol19/iss2/12