초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The status of modern Thai speech rhythm has been controversial. Some previous studies assume that it is stress-timed but others suspect that it is syllable-timed like other Southeast Asian languages. This study attempts to resolve this issue in terms of acoustic analysis using quantitative measures suggested by previous research. A set of Thai speech data comprising 882 sentence level utterance tokens was generated by 21 native speakers. After stages of data preprocessing, the two robust metrics, %V and nPVI-V were extracted and compared with the same metrics of pre-classified major languages. According to the results, Thai cannot be clearly classified in either extreme rhythm type. Unlike several previous studies, it is concluded that Thai has a form closer to the group of syllable-timed languages. Besides, it was also found that spoken Thai can exhibit a different rhythm structure depending upon the style of speech. Further quantitative analyses considering various linguistic and sociological factors are necessary for fundamental exploration of modern Thai speech rhythm and its dynamicity as well as for practical applications to speech systems or spoken Thai education.
