An Acoustic Study of Fundamental Frequency and Pauses in Depressive Teenagers in Thailand: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Depression is a major public health problem among Thais. It has been reported that 30% of 70 million people living in Thailand suffer from depression. Suicide is a potential end result from mental illness, which normally involves depression. Diagnosis and treatment are key factors in the prevention of depression. In traditional diagnosis, there are two key methods of testing: (i) a screening test and interview and (ii) a biomarker test. In recent years, detecting depression with speech—a kind of biomarker test— has gained high acceptance. Cues of suprasegments in speech, such as pauses, loudness, tones, rhythm, and phonation, have been scientifically proven using acoustic methods of being indicators of depression. This paper has two main objectives: (i) to conduct a review of the use of suprasegments as cues and an analysis of the cues capable of indicating depression in Thailand and (ii) to analyze an acoustic study of pitch measured by the fundamental frequency and silent pause length in depressed and non-depressed participants. The method used in the study is the acoustic method of linguistics. Praat program version 6.2.09 was used to analyze the data. This is a pilot study of three depressed Thai students aged 20 compared with three non-depressed Thai participants. We propose a new perspective upon Thai language speech indicators that combines two or more cues in detecting depression (e.g. depression inventory with pause duration and word signs). Interestingly, it was found that the pitch of Thai tones may not be an appropriate cue for depression in Thais. This result conflicts with previous research conducted in other non-tonal languages. The results of this study lay the foundation for a Thai speech index for depression that can be further developed for the detection of depression.