Bringing indexical orders to non-arbitrary meaning: The case of pitch and politeness in English and Korean

Abstract

In this study, we investigated whether the relationship between pitch and politeness is mediated through iconic relationships between pitch and other talker attributes, and whether these relationships can differ across languages. US and South Korean listeners completed a speaker perception task in which they heard utterances and rated the speaker on a number of attributes, including politeness. The pitch of each utterance was unmanipulated, raised, or lowered. The results confirm previous work suggesting that in Korean, lower pitch is associated with politeness, which contrasts with both the English results we find, and claims of a universal association between higher pitch and politeness (i.e., Ohala’s Frequency Code). At the same time, the impact of pitch on attributes like perceived height, strength, and emotion are similar across listener groups: speakers in higher pitched guises are heard as shorter, weaker, and more emotional. Like others, we argue that pitch can be associated non-arbitrarily with a range of meanings, but additionally appeal to orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003) to account for the similarities between the groups, as well as the differences. Our results are of significance for researchers looking at non-arbitrary meaning of acoustic cues as well as the acoustics of politeness, especially in interaction with polite registers in Korean.

Acoustic correlates of perceived personality from Korean utterances in a formal communicative setting

“…This result was interesting because an increase in pitch has been reported in other languages for polite speech [ 14 ]. Holliday et al [ 15 ] showed that speakers with higher-pitched voices were perceived as being smaller in size, weaker, and more emotional by both Korean and English speakers, supporting [ 16 ], but they were perceived as being less and more polite by Korean and English speakers, respectively. These findings suggest that physical size and emotion are related differently to politeness in the two languages, thereby causing the cross-linguistic differences.…”

“…These findings suggest that physical size and emotion are related differently to politeness in the two languages, thereby causing the cross-linguistic differences. The same study also found that higher- and lower-pitched speech was perceived as being more friendly and more confident, respectively, in English, whereas Korean showed no such relationship [ 15 ]. These previous studies suggest that the judgment of attributes or personality traits based on acoustic and phonetic cues is complex and culturally bounded.…”

“…The goal of this study was to explore acoustic correlates of the perceived personality of Korean speakers in formal communicative settings by focusing on utterances of customer service clerks. The current study evaluated perceived personality of the utterances using the Big-Five Model [15]. It is a personality model which has been widely used in many face and voice perception studies [17][18][19], and assesses personality using 5 dimensions -extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness.…”