Prosodic properties of formality in conversational Japanese

Sherr-Ziarko, Ethan

doi:10.1017/s0025100318000117

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…A look at table 1 makes it apparent that the correlates of polite speech are quite variegated, sometimes even when it comes to different studies of the same language. For example, for Japanese, there is evidence that is consistent with the idea that high pitch signals politeness [36,56,92], as well as studies that found a lowering of pitch [104], as well as studies that found no reliable differences [103]. However, one issue that makes it hard to establish any overarching cross-linguistic tendencies is that the studies used different tasks, as well as different definitions of politeness.…”

Section: The Frequency Codementioning

confidence: 93%

“…Table 1 shows that there are a number of studies that can be thought of as contradicting the frequency code. These studies either find that speakers actively lower their voice pitch in a polite condition as opposed to a comparison condition [87,97,100,101,104,106,107] or they find no consistent pitch difference [103,105]. A look at table 1 makes it apparent that the correlates of polite speech are quite variegated, sometimes even when it comes to different studies of the same language.…”

Section: The Frequency Codementioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena

Winter

Hübscher

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such as teeny ), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a multiplicity of possible communicative meanings. Cultural and contextual variation determines which specific meanings become manifest in a specific interactional context. We use the evidence from our meta-analysis to propose an updated view of the frequency code hypothesis that is based on the existence of many-to-many mappings between speech acoustics and communicative interpretations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

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Section: The Frequency Codementioning

confidence: 93%

Section: The Frequency Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena

Winter

Hübscher

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Methodological differences may be of help in explaining the discrepancy between the current work and the previous literature: Ohara (1999) analyzed spontaneous speech, whereas we analyzed read speech. In Japanese, politeness is marked lexically, grammatically and phonetically ( Sherr-Ziarko, 2019 ). It may be that in the present study, where participants could only manipulate the phonetic dimension of their speech, as it is a reading task, males did not hesitate to do so.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilinguals Produce Pitch Range Differently in Their Two Languages to Convey Social Meaning

Passoni¹,

Leeuw

Levon

2022

Lang Speech

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We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identitity and politeness moderated pitch range in the two languages of female and male Japanese-English sequential bilinguals. The bilinguals were resident in either London (UK) or Tokyo (Japan) and read sentences to imagined addressees who varied in formality and sex. Results indicated significant differences in the pitch range of the two languages of the bilinguals, and this was confirmed for female and male bilinguals in London and Tokyo, with the language differences being more extreme in the London bilinguals than in the Tokyo bilinguals. Interestingly, self-attribution of masculine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the female bilinguals, whereas self-attribution of feminine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the male bilinguals. In addition, female and male bilinguals significantly varied their pitch range in Japanese, but not in English, as a function of the imagined addressees. Findings confirmed that bilinguals produce pitch range differently in their languages and suggest that expression of social meaning may affect pitch range of the two languages of female and male bilinguals differently.

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“…The utterances in that study were much shorter, simpler, lab-elicited sentences, for which third-order polynomials were sufficient. Sherr-Ziarko (2019) used 25th-order polynomials (!) to first fit and then segment f 0 contours in long Japanese utterances containing many pitch accents.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

Baltazani

Przedlacka²,

Ünal-Logačev³

et al. 2022

Lang Var Change

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Asia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turkey with three subsequent generations born in Greece. We examine how long contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f0 patterns in four generations of AMG speakers with those of their Athenian Greek- and Turkish-speaking contemporaries. The speech of the first-generation of AMG speakers exhibits two patterns in the f0 curve shape and time alignment of the continuation rises, one Athenian-like and one Turkish-like. Over subsequent generations use of the latter diminishes, while the Athenian pattern becomes more frequent, indicating intergenerational change.

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Prosodic properties of formality in conversational Japanese

Cited by 11 publications

References 41 publications

Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena

Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena

Bilinguals Produce Pitch Range Differently in Their Two Languages to Convey Social Meaning

Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

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