Cross-dialectal analysis of English pitch register and its influence on perceived speech friendliness
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Date
2015-02-23
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Abstract
Intonation is a pragmatically meaningful cue in evaluating speech (Grabe et al. 2003). While intonational contours may be interpreted differently depending on the context, pitch range has been named a speech parameter especially conducive to judging speaker’s friendliness. As Ohala (1983) explains, pitch range can be analysed either as pitch span, which is the fluctuation between the lowest and the highest pitch level in the speaker’s voice, or as pitch register, i.e. the average vocal frequency of an individual speaker. In our previous research, a comparison of pitch register in Dutch, English and Polish led us to the conclusion that languages with a higher pitch register are perceived as more friendly. Moreover, we noted that even a slight difference of 5 Hz in frequency is noticeable by listeners and affects their judgments. Similarly, differences in pitch range are observable across different varieties of English and can play a role in their reception (Cruttenden 1994: 141, Malarski 2013). Therefore, the present study focuses on these differences across several dialects of English with the aim to investigate the potential effect of pitch range on perceived speech friendliness.
For the present study, we recorded two male middle-aged speakers for each of the following accents of English: Southern British, Manchester, Australian, General American and Canadian. We selected short fragments of spontaneous speech and modified intonation by lowering and raising pitch register in the recordings by 5Hz and 10Hz using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2013). The material was randomized and prepared for a listening survey. 50 students at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań were asked to evaluate the recordings in terms of friendliness on a 7-point Likert scale. The additional criteria were attractiveness, self-confidence and prestige. Our predictions are that students will 1) rate the accents with higher pitch register as more friendly, 2) rate modified recordings with raised pitch as more friendly, and 3) rate modified recordings with lowered pitch as less friendly. If these hypotheses are confirmed, they will constitute new evidence for stating that suprasegmentals, and pitch register in particular, are powerful cues for listeners in pragmatic judgments of speech.
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Societas Linguistica Europaea Conference, 11 September 2014, Poznań
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Keywords
Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, English, Sociophonetics, Intonation, Language Attitudes, Pitch Range