Voice quality, rhythm and valorized femininities

Patrick CallierGeorgetown University

Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, 9/2/2010

Voice quality—review

• Voice quality as index of speaker emotional or physical state– e.g. creak = resignation (Laver 1980)

• Mass mediated representations of voice quality quite diverse – Teshigawara 2003

• reveals anime heroes’ and villains’ true nature

– Starr 2006• “Sweet” voice quality indexes speaker’s

authentic femininity

Rhythm—review

• PVI (pairwise variability index): quantitative measure of local fluctuations in duration– Low PVIs usu. = “syllable-timing” (depends what

interval you are using)– High PVIs usu. = “stress-timing”

• Singaporean English, Spanish both more “syllable-timed” than many of worlds’ languages.– Cantonese, Mandarin, also heavily syllable-timed

(Mok 2008).

Rhythm, cont’d.

• If what we are measuring is just durational variability (is it?), a measure of sample-wide duration variance should also be informative.

• Enter ΔC, the standard deviation of a consonantal interval– Friends: ΔV, ΔS

• Normalize for speech rate: VarcoΔC/V/S– Lower = less variability

Sociolinguistics of rhythm

• AAE’s transition from syllable-timed to stress-timed (Thomas and Carter 2006)

• “Maria’s” adoption of syllable-timing as peer group changes (Carter 2006)

• Final lengthening alongside other stylistic markers in unique –er of Australian immigrant English variety (Kiesling 2005)

Data

• Nüren hua ‘Women flowers’, 2008 mainland Chinese TV serial drama

• Larger study: rhythm and voice quality in 6 characters (3 men, 3 women)

http://www.hsgd.net.cn/userfiles/323232.jpg

Lin Xuelianhttp://pic4.sdnews.com.cn/NewsImg/2008/3/5/U2389P28T3D1936726F326DT20080305115506.jpg

Ouyang Xiu

Methods

• Voice quality– Identify potential stretches of creak

auditorily– In case of ambiguous percept, use Praat

to confirm spectral evidence– Measure presence and duration

Methods, cont’d.

• Rhythm– Use (normalized) syllabic PVI (nSPVI)

and VarcoΔS (Mok 2008)– Use segmental spellings of Chinese

orthography as syllabification guide

Results

• Divergence in voice quality• Similarity in rhythm

Voice qualityP

erce

nt c

reak

(s

ecs/

sec)

Rhythm

Discussion

• Lin is creaky– Also: a widow, trying to seduce the main

character’s love interest, a wheeler-and-dealer (cf. Zhang’s [2008] “smooth operator”)

• Ouyang is modal (perhaps breathy?)– Married, politically active, a

schoolteacher, an accomplished fighter

Discussion, cont’d.

• Voice quality may still be indexical of “authentic” femininity or lack thereof– rubrics of valorization are culturally

constrained– Modal voice (in contrast to Lin’s creak)

valorizes a very martial, revolutionary type of woman

Discussion, cont’d.

• And rhythm?– Both relatively stress-timed compared to

men– Analysis of rhythm’s social meaning may

be enhanced by comparison with other speakers

Conclusion

• How to assess the social meaning of rhythm?– Rhythmic measures like PVI are highly

variable within individuals– No clear stylistic effect at utterance level

(pace Drager, Eckert and Moon 2008)• How do you hear a “rhythm switch”?

– Is it all “similarity-to-variety X” type meaning?

Conclusion

• And voice quality?– When isn’t it a rheme of “essence”?

• As a strategy to expand effective pitch range (Podesva 2007, Mendoza-Denton n.d.)?

• What constrains these meanings?

Thanks

• Rob Podesva & his Language and Identity class for early feedback

• Anastasia Nylund for valuable conversation and idea-swapping

• Daanish and Hammad Ahmed for software help

• Cala Zubair for hardware help

Contact:

Patrick CallierGeorgetown University Department of Linguisticsprc23@georgetown.edu