Vietnamese Final Stop Consonants/p, t, k/Described in Terms of Formant Transition Slopes

It is well known that bursts and voiced formant transitions serve as separate cues to the place of articulation of initial stop consonants. The Vietnamese presents three final voiceless stop consonants /p, t, k/ without bursts. It is an opportunity to study these final stop consonants and to compare their characteristics with those of the corresponding initial stop consonants. As final consonants were never studied before, this paper analyses the vowel-consonant (VC) and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) productions in terms of the transition duration, the starting formant transition values and the slopes of the VC transitions. Measurements have shown that in the same preceding vowel contexts, the three final stop consonants /p, t, k/ are always clearly different by at least one of the three slopes of F1, F2, and F3. These final stop consonants can also be differentiated in the locus equation space. The results also pointed out the effects of the final consonants on either long vowels or short vowels. This explains why Vietnamese could not pronounce the short vowels in isolation.