Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

Burmese is a language of South-East Asia featuring a contrast between voiced and voiceless nasals. Voicing is an articulatory phenomenon involving the vibration of vocal folds and is the mechanism behind contrastive sounds in English such as /p/-/b/ and /t/-/d/. This contrast pertains to nasals—a typically voiced category including English consonants such as /m/ and /n/—in Burmese. I conducted a production study examining acoustic properties associated with the voicing contrast in Burmese nasals. The results confirmed well attestedpatterns found in the literature and includes a novel finding regarding an interaction between three factors and its correlation with voicing.