Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2xdlg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T11:18:20.175Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Perceptions of Style: A Focus on Fundamental Frequency and Perceived Social Characteristics

from Part II - The Structure of Social Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2021

By
Katie Drager ,
Kate Hardeman-Guthrie ,
Rachel Schutz  and
Ivan Chik
Edited by
Lauren Hall-Lew ,
Emma Moore  and
Robert J. Podesva
Lauren Hall-Lew
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Emma Moore
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Robert J. Podesva
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

Summary

This chapter investigates perceived speaker style, reporting results from a matched-guise experiment examining the effect of pitch on perceived talker characteristics. The experiment, conducted in Hawai?i, uses an ethnically diverse talker and participant sample. Two types of analyses were conducted: one used quantitative analysis and broad social categories and the other used tag clouds, where font size represents token frequency, and comparisons across the tag clouds were made qualitatively. The results demonstrate a nuanced relationship between pitch and perceived social characteristics, where the effect of pitch differs depending on what other characteristics are attributed to the speaker. Results also provide evidence that the perceived size of the talker can shift in ways that are counter to widely held beliefs about the link between pitch and perceived size. The results from this study demonstrate that researchers investigating the effect of linguistic variation on perceived social information should examine a range of perceived traits (as well as interactions between those traits) and should include voices and participants from demographic groups that are underrepresented in the literature.

Keywords

perceptionsocial meaningindexicalityHawai‘ipitchethnicitygender
Type
Chapter
Information
Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation
Theorizing the Third Wave
 , pp. 176 - 202
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aboud, Frances E., Clément, Richard, and Taylor, Donald M.. 1974. Evaluational reactions to discrepancies between social class and language. Sociometry 37(2), 239–50.Google Scholar
Addington, David W. 1968. The relationship of selected vocal characteristics to personality perception. Speech Monographs 35(4), 492–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anisfeld, Moshe, Bogo, N., and Lambert, William E.. 1962. Evaluational reactions to accented English speech. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 65(4), 223–31.Google Scholar
van Bezooijen, Reneé. 1995. Sociocultural aspects of pitch differences between Japanese and Dutch women. Language and Speech 38(3), 253–65.Google Scholar
Brekhus, Wayne. 1998. A sociology of the unmarked: Redirecting our focus. Sociological Theory 16(1), 34–51.Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2007. Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82(1), 32–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011. Intersecting variables and perceived sexual orientation in men. American Speech 86(1), 52–68.Google Scholar
Cole, Jennifer, Thomas, Erik R., Britt, Erica, and Coggshall, Elizabeth. 2001. Gender and ethnicity in intonation: A case study of North Carolina English. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Coleman, R.O. 1973. A comparison of the contributions of two vocal characteristics to the perception of maleness and femaleness in the voice. Speech, Music, and Hearing Quarterly Progress and Status Report 14(2/3), 13–22.Google Scholar
Collins, Sarah A. 2000. Men’s voices and women’s choices. Animal Behaviour 60(6), 773–80.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In Eckert, P. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 185–210.Google Scholar
van Dommelen, Wim A., and Moxness, Bente H.. 1995. Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: Sex-specific behavior. Language and Speech 38(3), 267–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette. 2016. Social Meaning in Linguistic Perception. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.Google Scholar
Drager, Katie, Salter, Carly, and Macinkowicz, Megan. 2010. Perceived style, sexuality, and pitch: An experimental approach. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 39. San Antonio, TX: University of Texas at San Antonio.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4), 453–76.Google Scholar
Fraccaro, Paul J., O’Connor, Jillian J. M., Re, Daniel E., Jones, Benedict C., DeBruine, Lisa M., and Feinberg, David R.. 2013. Faking it: Deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness. Animal Behavior 85(1), 127–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaudio, Rudolf P. 1994. Sounding gay: Properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1), 30–57.Google Scholar
Hawkins, Francine Dove. 1993. Speaker ethnic identification: The roles of speech sample, fundamental frequency, speaker and listener variations. Ph.D. dissertation. College Park: University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Hearst, Marti A., and Rosner, Daniela. 2008. Tag clouds: Data analysis tool or social signaller? In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual: 160–70.Google Scholar
Hillenbrand, James M., and Clark, Michael J.. 2009. The role of f0 and formant frequencies in distinguishing the voices of men and women. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71(5), 1150–66.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Dan, Ranganath, Rajesh, and McFarland, Dan. 2009. Extracting social meaning: Identifying interactional style in spoken conversation. Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL. Boulder, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics, 638–46.Google Scholar
Kirtley, M. Joelle. 2015. Language, identity, and non-binary gender in Hawai‘i. PhD dissertation. Mānoa: University of Hawai‘i.Google Scholar
Künzel, Hermann J. 1989. How well does average fundamental frequency correlate with speaker height and weight? Phonetica 46, 117–25.Google Scholar
Lass, Norman J., and Brown, William S.. 1978. Correlational study of speakers’ heights, weights, body surface areas, and speaking fundamental frequencies. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63(4), 1218–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levon, Erez. 2006. Hearing ‘gay’: Prosody, interpretation, and the affective judgments of men’s speech. American Speech 81(1), 56–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levon, Erez. 2007. Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36(4), 533–54.Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. 2014. Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society 43(5), 539–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loveday, Leo. 1981. Pitch, politeness and sexual role: An exploratory investigation into the pitch correlates of English and Japanese politeness formulae. Language and Speech 24(1), 71–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma. 2010. The interaction between social category and social practice: Explaining was/were variation. Language Variation and Change 22(3), 347–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma, and Podesva, Robert. 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38(4), 447–85.Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, and Babel, Molly. 2007. Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5), 416–49.Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, McDonald, Elizabeth C., DeBoe, Nancy L., and White, Aubrey R.. 2006. The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34(2), 202–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, Gordon E., and Barney, Harold L.. 1952. Control methods used in a study of the vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 24(2), 175–84.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4), 478–504.Google Scholar
Purnell, T., Idsardi, W., and Baugh, J.. 1999. Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18(1), 10–30.Google Scholar
Puts, David A. 2010. Beauty and the beast: Mechanisms of sexual selection in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior 31(3), 157–75.Google Scholar
Puts, David Andrew, Hodges, Carolyn R., Cárdena, Rodrigo A., and Gaulin, Steven J.C.. 2007. Men’s voices as dominance signals: Vocal fundamental and formant frequencies influence dominance attributions among men. Evolution and Human Behavior 28, 340–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reischer, Erica, and Koo, Kathryn S.. 2004. The body beautiful: Symbolism and agency in the social world. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, 297–317.Google Scholar
Riggs, Damien W., and Selby, Jane M. 2003. Setting the seen: Whiteness as unmarked category in psychologists’ writings on race in Australia. In Katsikitis, M. (ed.), Proceedings of the 38th Australian Psychological Society Annual Conference. Melbourne, AU, 190–4.Google Scholar
Sakoda, Kent, and Siegel, Jeff. 2003. Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai‘i. Honolulu, HI: Bess Press.Google Scholar
Sato, Charlene. 1985. Linguistic inequality in Hawaii: The post-creole dilemma. In Wolfson, N. and Manes, J. (eds.), Language of Inequality. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 255–72.Google Scholar
Sato, Charlene. 1993. Language change in a creole continuum: Decreolization? In Hyltenstam, K. and Viberg, A. (eds.), Progression and Regression in Language: Sociocultural, Neuropsychological, and Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 122–43.Google Scholar
Saxton, Tamsin K., Mackey, Lauren L., McCarthy, Kristofor, and Neave, Nick. 2016. A lover or a fighter? Opposing sexual selection pressures on men’s vocal pitch and facial hair. Behavioral Ecology 27(2), 512–9.Google Scholar
Schnoebelen, Tyler, and Drager, Katie. 2014. The perception of social types: Using LDA to analyze open-response answers. Paper presented at the International Conference on Language and Social Psychology 14. Honolulu, HI.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3), 193–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smyth, Ron, Jacobs, Greg, and Rogers, Henry. 2003. Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: An experimental and theoretical approach. Language in Society 32(3), 329–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szakay, Anita. 2006. Rhythm and pitch as markers of ethnicity in New Zealand English. Proceedings of the 11th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology. Aukland, NZ: Australian Speech Science & Technology Association, 421–6.Google Scholar
Szakay, Anita. 2012. Voice quality as a marker of ethnicity in New Zealand: From acoustics to perception. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(3), 382–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taniguchi, Angela S., and Linda, Heidenreich. 2005. Rethinking the Use of Hapa in Mixed-race Asian/Pacific Islander American Community Organizing. WSU McNair Journal, 135–46.Google Scholar
Thakerar, Jitendra N., and Giles, Howard. 1981. They are – so they spoke: Noncontent speech stereotypes. Language & Communication 1(2/3), 255–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. 2002. Sociophonetic applications of speech perception experiments. American Speech 77(2), 115–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R., and Reaser, Jeffrey. 2004. Delimiting perceptual cues used for the ethnic labeling of African American and European American voices. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1), 54–87.Google Scholar
Waksler, R. 2001. Pitch range and women’s sexual orientation. Word 52(1), 69–77.Google Scholar
Walton, Julie H., and Orlikoff, Robert F.. 1994. Speaker race identification from acoustic cues in the vocal signal. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37(4), 738–45.Google Scholar
Wilson, William H. 1998. I ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi ke ola, ‘Life is found in the Hawaiian language’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 132, 123–37.Google Scholar
Zhang, Qing. 2005. A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34(3), 431–66.Google Scholar
Zimman, Lal. 2017. Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s/. Language in Society 46(3), 339–70.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×