This study explores the relationship between pitch and voice quality in productions of the Thai falling tone, with a focus on phonation characteristics across sentence-medial and sentence-final contexts. Thai tones are typically described in terms of pitch contour, but prior work suggests that voice quality may also play a role in distinguishing tonal categories. Using read-aloud production data from native Thai speakers, I examine the extent to which creaky phonation co-occurs with the falling tone and whether its presence varies by prosodic position. Preliminary observations indicate that creaky voice frequently appears in sentence-final tokens but is less consistently present in sentence-medial environments. Acoustic analysis is currently underway, focusing on measures including H1–H2, spectral tilt, and cepstral peak prominence. This work contributes to ongoing discussion of how tonal and segmental phonetic cues interact in connected speech and highlights the need for more detailed descriptions of phonation in tonal systems.
Camp et al. (Wed,) studied this question.