A Contrastive Study of F3 Correlation with F2 and F1 in Thai and Hindi

The third formant of vowels is generally known to have multiple correlates. F3 is generally associated with lip rounding in the articulation of vowels as well as with a lowering effect on other formants. The present study addresses the question whether `the third formant effects ± back and ± open feature of the vowels?´ with data from two languages Hindi and Thai. A contrastive study of seven long peripheral vowels of Thai a tonal language and seven long peripheral vowels of Hindi, a non-tonal language is presented in this paper. We arrive at some interesting results which need to be further examined with data from more speakers and more languages.