Utterance-final lengthening in Thai: A preliminary report

Utterance-final lengthening is awell-documented cross-linguistic phenomenon. While previous studies have noted itspresence in Thai, systematic and empirical investigations remain limited. This studyaddresses this gap by conducting an acoustic analysis of utterance-final lengthening inThai, using data produced by native speakers. Four frequently occurring polysemousThai words—‘dai’ /dâːj/, ‘hai’ /hâj/, ‘pen’ /pen/, and ‘laeo’ /lɛ́ːw/—were selected andembedded in sentences designed to place them either medially or finally. These sentenceswere produced and recorded by twenty-one speakers of central Thai. Acousticmeasurements and statistical analysis of the relevant speech tokens revealed that wordrime durations in utterance-final positions were, on average, 3.5 times longer than inmedial positions. The lengthening effect in final positions was so substantial that itconsiderably masked the temporal difference between function and content words. Interactions with other factors, such as vowel length, lexical tone and word type werealso examined. These findings are expected to provide preliminary information on Thaiutterance-final lengthening, contributing to the prosodic analysis of Thai and offerinsights for cross-linguistic typological research.