Abstract:
This research aims to analyze the acoustic characteristics (i.e. the fundamental frequency, the amplitude and the duration) of the Thai pause fillers and to compare these characteristics with the surrounded non-pause fillers or normal words. This study also investigates the relationship between those acoustic characteristics of the Thai pause fillers and the syntactic positions. The data were collected from thirty educated subjects of Standard Thai. They were asked to narrates three stories about themselves, the impressive tourist places, and the country economy. In analyzing the syntactic positions of the pause fillers, I use "The Structure of Thai: Grammatical System" (Vichin Panupong, 1989) and "A Grammar of Contemporary English" (Quirk et als., 1972) as a framework of the study. The average of the fundamental frequency, the amplitude and the duration of each pause filler were measured, as well as the average of the normal words within each syntactic unit, by using Praat. The results show that the average of the fundamental frequencies and the amplitudes of the pause fillers are significantly lower than those of the normal words. But the average of the durations of the pause fillers are significantly longer than those of the normal words. The pause fillers are found both at the clause boundaries and within the clauses. In addition, the pause fillers are also found after incomplete clauses. The frequency of the pause fillers occurring at the clause boundaries is higher than that of the pause fillers occurring within the clauses and after the incomplete clauses. Moreover, the average of the duration of the pause fillers occurring at the clause boundaries is longer than that of the pause fillers occurring within the clauses and after the incomplete clauses. When measuring the duration of pause fillers occurring with silences, the overall duration of the fillers occurring at the clause boundary is still longer than the overall duration of the fillers occurring within the clauses and after the incomplete clauses.