Search

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.

Research in sociophonetic perception has suggested that linguistic factors influence the social meaning of a particular variant, such that the strength of social meaning appears to be mediated by factors like grammatical category or phonological environment. Here, we further investigate the impact of linguistic factors on the perception of sociolinguistic variables by examining evaluations of /s/ aspiration in the speech of four male Puerto Rican Spanish speakers. We look at how evaluations of this variable pattern based on the phonological context (preconsonantal vs. prevocalic), the proportion of a given variant ([s] or [h]) in the stimuli, and the listener residence (Puerto Rico vs. mainland US). Our results replicate earlier work showing that /s/ realization contributes to status and masculinity ratings. However, we do not find evidence of an effect of incremental changes in the proportions of [s]:[h] variants in an utterance or an effect of listener residence. Critically, we do find that phonological context influences the evaluations of listeners: [s] is rated as less masculine than [h] in preconsonantal environments, but in prevocalic environments, there is no effect of variant. Given that [s] is rarely found in preconsonantal contexts in Puerto Rican Spanish, and even less so in male speech, this result is consistent with studies arguing that social meaning is stronger in marked contexts. Expected patterns for gender, phonological context, and dialect interact to make an [s] realization of preconsonantal /s/ particularly rare in male speech of this variety, which opens the door for more robust socioindexical meaning.

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.

Two apparently contradictory observations have been made about consonantal voicing in Southern U.S. English: compared to other U.S. varieties, Southern speakers produce more voicing on “voiced” stops, but they also “devoice” word-final /z/ at higher rates. In this article, regional differences in final /z/ realization within Virginia are investigated. Thirty-six students from Southwest and Northern Virginia were recorded completing tasks designed to elicit /z/-final tokens. Tokens were acoustically analyzed for duration and voicing; they were also automatically categorized as being [z] or [s] using an HTK forced aligner. At the surface level, the two approaches yield incompatible results: the single acoustic measures suggest that the Southwest Virginians produce more [z]-like /z/ tokens than the Northern Virginians, and the aligner finds that the Southern-identifying participants produce the most [s]-like tokens. However, both analyses converge on the importance of following environment: the Southwest Virginians are relatively least voiced prepausally and more voiced in other environments. These combined findings confirm previous work showing that Southern “voiced” consonants generally have more voicing than other regional U.S. varieties but also suggest that the dialect may exhibit greater phrase-final fortition. There are also differences within Southwest Virginian speakers based on differences in their rurality or in their orientation to the South.

Intralingual subtitling—specifically, translation of audio in one language into non-optional text of the same language—can be used when a speaker’s dialect is considered difficult for target audiences to understand. Thus, these subtitles and the commentary surrounding them offer insights into ideologies of within-language intelligibility. In the present study, we investigate such ideologies from two approaches: by documenting how intralingual subtitles are being used in practice in two reality-based, US cooking shows, and by looking at published complaints about intralingual subtitles (primarily in US/UK English contexts). We find more subtitles for L2-English vs. L1-English speakers in the shows, and metacommentary around subtitling similarly suggests that L1-English subtitling is perceived as more salient and offensive, reflecting broader associations of unintelligibility with non-native speech. The use of subtitles for L1 English outside of noisy environments appears to be limited to certain varieties, such as Scottish or Indian English, suggesting that some L1 varieties of English can be acceptably codified as unintelligible. While the purpose of intralingual subtitles is ostensibly to facilitate communication and have been framed in the literature as tools for breaking down boundaries, both the practice and commentary around these subtitles highlight the largely negative connotations of marking someone as unintelligible.

Recent work has shown that listeners process words faster if said by a member of the group that typically uses the word. This paper further explores how the social distributions of words affect lexical access by exploring whether access is facilitated by invoking more abstract social categories. We conduct four experiments, all of which combine an Implicit Association Task with a Lexical Decision Task. Participants sorted real and nonsense words while at the same time sorting older and younger faces (exp. 1), male and female faces (exp. 2), stereo-typically male and female objects (exp. 3), and framed and unframed objects, which were always stereotypically male or female (exp. 4). Across the experiments, lexical decision to socially skewed words is facilitated when the socially congruent category is sorted with the same hand. This suggests that the lexicon contains social detail from which individuals make social abstractions that can influence lexical access.

Twenty women from Christchurch, New Zealand and 16 from Columbus Ohio (dialect region U.S. Midland) participated in a bimodal lexical naming task where they repeated monosyllabic words after four speakers from four regional dialects: New Zealand, Australia, U.S. Inland North and U.S. Midland. The resulting utterances were acoustically analyzed, and presented to listeners on Amazon Mechanical Turk in an AXB task. Convergence is observed, but differs depending on the dialect of the speaker, the dialect of the model, the particular word class being shadowed, and the order in which dialects are presented to participants. We argue that these patterns are generally consistent with findings that convergence is promoted by a large phonetic distance between shadower and model (Babel, 2010, contra Kim et al., 2011), and greater existing variability in a vowel class (Babel, 2012). The results also suggest that more comparisons of accommodation toward different dialects are warranted, and that the investigation of the socio-indexical meaning of specific linguistic forms in context is a promising avenue for understanding variable selectivity in convergence.