A cross-linguistic acoustic comparison of unreleased word-final stops

This study compared acoustic characteristics of final stops in Korean and Thai. Word-final stops are phonetically realized as unreleased stops in these languages. Native speakers of Korean and Thai produced monosyllabic words ending with [p t k] in each of their native languages (L1). Formant frequencies of /i a u/ at the vowel's offset were examined. In both languages, the place effect was significant and interacted with the vowel type. For non-front vowels (/a/ and /u/), F2 offset was highest before [t], while for the front vowel (/i/), it was highest before [k]. Preliminary results of a perception experiment with English-speaking listeners suggest that the absence of release bursts is most detrimental to the intelligibility of [k], least for [p] and intermediate for [t].