Intensity of the reader’s voice in the reading aloud of fiction: Effects of the character’s gender
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Date
2018-02
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The speaker’s gender is a crucial factor affecting the acoustic features of the voice. One such feature
is voice intensity, also known as sound pressure level (SPL). Previous studies have indicated that the
female voice may involve lower values of SPL than the male voice. Moreover, there are suggestions
that the variability of voice intensity tends to be lower for women than for men as well.
The major aim of this paper is to examine the effects of literary character’s gender on the
reader’s SPL, measured in decibels (dB), and the variability of voice intensity, measured as the
standard deviation (SD) of SPL, while reading prose aloud. The secondary aims are to investigate
the general shifts of SPL and SD of SPL in dialogues independently of other variables and to
consider the possible effects of the reader’s gender and the reader’s dialect. In order to
accomplish these tasks, a representative sample of dialogue excerpts with male and female
characters was used. Each fragment was located in the corresponding audiobook and analysed in
terms of the two acoustic features under discussion. Typical values of SPL and the SD of SPL for
different readers were measured in the entire chapters from which fragments were selected and
the results were compared with those obtained from the extracts. In this way, it was possible to
establish the relative shifts of SPL and the SD of SPL for each of the analysed fragments.
Contrary to what had been expected, a statistical analysis of the results revealed no effects of
the character’s gender on any of the response variables. However, conclusions concerning
secondary aims were more definitive. A general trend to decrease the SD of SPL in dialogues in
comparison to the rest of the text in a novel was observed. This tendency is independent of any of
the factors included in the study. It was also observed that male American readers tend to lower
their voice intensity when reading dialogues. All these findings may be applied in developing text
to speech software.
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Keywords
voice intensity, sound pressure level, gender in language, sex in language
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 52.3 (2017), pp. 285-323
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0081-6272