Publications - Center of Excellence in Southeast Asian Linguistics

Reconstructing the Human Genetic History of Mainland Southeast Asia: Insights from Genome-Wide Data from Thailand and Laos

2021

Thailand and Laos, located in the center of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), harbor diverse ethnolinguistic groups encompassing all five language families of MSEA: Tai-Kadai (TK), Austroasiatic (AA), Sino-Tibetan (ST), Hmong-Mien (HM), and Austronesian (AN). Previous genetic studies of Thai/Lao populations have focused almost exclusively on uniparental markers and there is

The Tai Ahom sound system as reflected by the texts recorded in the Bark manuscripts

2020

Tai Ahom (Southwestern Tai) mostly survives in manuscripts. (Terwiel 1988; Morey 2015). It has long been held that Ahom retained many archaic features lost in most modern Tai languages. For example, Li (1977: 87-89) reconstructs the cluster *phr- as evidence from Ahom in words like phra ‘rock’ and phrai ‘walk’.

Acoustic Variation of (kh) in Fai Mun Village Phuan, Pa Kha Sub-district, Tha Wang Pha District, Nan Province

2020

This paper aims to investigate acoustic variation of (kh) in Fai Mun village Phuan, Pa Kha sub-district, Tha Wang Pha district, Nan province among 3 age groups. The informants are divided into three groups based on their age: the first group is 60 years and above, the second group is

A new look at Pattani Malay initial geminates: A statistical and machine learning approach

2020

In this paper, we present a statistical and machine learning approach to the acoustic discrimination of a cross-linguistically unusual phonological contrast, initial geminates vs. singletons in Pattani Malay. We show that the only statistically significant difference between geminates and singletons is the duration of the consonant itself. No differences in

Formant frequency normalization for studying vowel variation in Thai

2019

This study aims to analyze formant frequencies of Thai vowels and suggests vowel formant frequency normalization suitable for acoustic characteristics of Thai vowels. The used method is S-centroid procedure (Watt & Fabricius, 2002), which is an algorithm for a sociophonetic study. The first and second formant frequencies of Thai long

Investigating the Corner-Corn effect in Auditory Processing

2019

We present two auditory-auditory priming experiments investigating whether decomposition effects for pseudo- related prime-target pairs like corner → CORN are restricted to early visual word recognition [10] or can also be found in auditory processing. Experiment 1 shows no difference in facilitation effects for pseudo-suffixed pairs and purely phonologically-related pairs