ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างลักษณะทางกลสัทศาสตร์ของการหยุดกับการจัดผลัดในการสนทนาภาษาไทย / เสาวลักษณ์ เมืองแมน = Relationship between acoustic characteristics of pause and turn management in conversation in Thai / Saowalak Muangman
This research attempts to study the relationship between the acoustics characteristics of pauses and their functions in turn management. Four types of turns, classifying from their function in turn management are found, i.e. turn holding, smooth turn switching, non-smooth turn switching, and turn snatching. The data for this study are 4 cases of television interviews. The 4 cases are of 4 different topics and 2 different interview objectives: interview for opinion and interview for facts. The total pause defined units are 2910. Context of participants, i.e., the role of conversation participants and the role of being interviewer and interviewee of participants is taken into account. Duration of pauses in the 4 types of turn management is different. The shortest pause is the pause occurring before the turn snatching and the longest pause is the pause occuring in the non-smooth turn switching. The duration of pause occuring in the turn holding is vary close to the duration of pause occurring in the smooth turn switching. They are longer than the turn-snatching pause and shorter than the non-smooth turn-switching pause. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of the pauses among the 4 types of turn management indicates that the differences found are statistically insignificant. Comparing the duration of pauses in turn management in interviews with 2 different objectives. It is found that in interviewing for opinions the duration of pauses is longer than in interviewing for facts. It is explainable that conversational participants give more time for their partner to think and arrange their opinions before delivering them. Comparing the pause duration in terms of interviewer and interviewee the study reveals that the specific role of participants has a strong influence on the duration of pauses in each type of turn management. The turn-holding, smooth turn switching, and turn-snatching pause of the interviewees are longer than those of the interviewer.
The non-smooth turn switching of the interviewer is longer than those of the interviewees, however there is only one case of non-smooth turn switching in the speech of interviewer. The t-test of the differences in the duration of pauses between interviewer and interviewees indicates that in turn-holding the pauses of the interviewees and interviewer are statistically significant but the differences in the duration of pauses in other types of turns are statistically insignificant. The duration of pauses of different types of turns in the interviewer varies, and there is a pattern in terms of the differences. Duration of pauses in non-smooth turn switching is the longest. Pauses in smooth turn switching is shorter than the non-smooth one but longer than the turn holding and the turn snatching pauses accordingly. The duration of pauses in the speech of interviewees varies, and there are 2 types of patterns. In giving opinions, the interviewees have the same type of pattern of differences in the duration of pauses as the interviewer. However, in giving facts the interviewees have a longer duration of turn holding pauses than the smooth turn switching pauses. This research has exhibited that the acoustic characteristic of pauses, i.e., the duration of pauses, is an important signals in turn management. The differences of the duration of pauses in the 4 types of turns clearly have their own patterns. Although the differences found are statistically insignificant due to the overlapping of the values of these duration in the 4 types of turns. It is explainable that pause may not be the only signal used in turn management. There may be some other important cues such as intonation, stress, syntactic cue, and other paralinguistic nonverbal cues used in conversation turn management. It is also suggested that the context of situation of the conversation, i.e., the conversational topic, the objective of the interviews, the relationship between the conversational participants, such as, their role as the interviewer or interviewees, their relative social status, especially, seniority etc., has a strong influence on the variation of the duration of pauses. These aspects are recommended for further research.
