An acoustic study on the paralinguistic prosody in the Politeness talk in Taiwan Mandarin

The relationship between the interlocutors is known, in Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, to be influential on speakers’ tone of voice. This study examined this phenomenon from acoustical aspects by measuring the duration and pitch of the dialogues made by pairs of talkers. Shorter word duration is found between strangers’ dialogues and lower pitch register is found in female talkers’ speech to males. The findings indicate that the prosody of talkers indeed varies with their familiarity with hearers and also with hearers’ gender. Introduction Speakers’ speech styles in conversations have been found, in order to be considered polite, to be adjusted to the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and the influential factors are hearers’ gender, the power relationship, and familiarity between the interlocutors (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Holmes, 2001). The present study, using familiarity and hearers’ gender as factors (Ofuka, McKeown, Waterman, & Roach, 2000), aims to find out their effects on the duration and pitch of young females’ speeches in Taiwan Mandarin. Method The current study used the Word Card Display game, which is a slightly varied version of the Shape Display Task (Fon, 2006). Modifications were made to obtain a better control for data elicitation.