Role of pitch in perceiving politeness in Korean

It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16, 17], contradicting the idea that high pitch is polite across all cultures, as proposed by Ohala’s Frequency Code hypothesis [e.g., 12]. This study looks at pitch as a perceptual cue to politeness in Korean. Ten Korean listeners heard short utterances from eight different speakers and judged whether each utterance was spoken in a polite (contaymal) or informal (panmal) register. Results indicate that F0 manipulation did affect politeness perception, but with an unexpected gender effect: High pitch was perceived as polite by Korean females and as informal by Korean males. These findings suggest a mismatch of politeness production and perception, and they reveal important gender differences in how the same acoustic cues are imbued with different kinds of politeness meanings.