Language Log

Laura Starecheski, "Can Changing How You Sound Help You Find Your Voice?", NPR All Things Considered 10/14/2014:

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job.  

At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think.

There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.  This can be a problem — especially for women jockeying for power in male-dominated fields, like law.

A few years ago, with Jiahong Yuan and Chris Cieri, I took a look at variation in English word duration by phrasal position, using data from the Switchboard conversational-speech corpus ("The shape of a spoken phrase", LLOG 4/12/2006; Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman, and Chris Cieri, "Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation", InterSpeech 2006). As is often the case for simple-minded analysis of large speech datasets, this exercise showed a remarkably consistent pattern of variation — the plot below shows mean duration by position for phrases from 1 to 12 words long:

The Mandarin Broadcast News collection discussed in a recent post ("Consonant effects on F0 in Chinese", 6/12/2014) lends itself to a similar analysis of phrase-position effects on speech timing. So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I ran a couple of scripts to take a first look.

Following up on two earlier Breakfast Experiments™ ("Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", 6/5/2014; "Consonant effects on F0 are multiplicative", 6/6/2014), here are some semi-comparable measurements of consonant effects on fundamental frequency (F0) in Mandarin Chinese broadcast news speech.

[As I warned potential readers of those earlier posts, this is considerably more wonkish than most LLOG offerings.]

Why do people care about the effects of consonant features on F0? The main reason is that tonogenesis — the historical development of lexical tones — often arises from re-interpretation of "micromelodies" of this kind, typically driven by laryngeal features of consonants such as voiceless vs. voiced (e.g. p,t,k,s vs. b,d,g,z). So it's natural to wonder whether languages where this has already happened, like Mandarin Chinese, retain or suppress such effects.

[Warning: an unusually nerdy follow-up to an unusually nerdy post…] In the comments on yesterday's post "Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", the question came up whether the effect of consonant voicing on vowel pitch is additive (e.g. plus or minus N Hz) or multiplicative (up or down by M percent). The fact that I calculated the effects in proportional terms indicates that I assumed, without checking, that the effects are multiplicative.

One easy way to check this assumption is to redo the calculations for female vs. male speakers independently, since we expect the overall F0 patterns of female speakers to be about 65-70% higher on average. So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I did just that — it required changing just two characters in the scripts I wrote yesterday, so this was the easiest experiment ever…

I spent the past couple of days at a workshop on lexical tone, organized by Kristine Yu at UMass. A topic that came up several times was the question of whether "segmental" influences on pitch — for instance, the fact that voiceless consonants are typically associated with a higher pitch in the first part of a following vowel — might be diminished or even eliminated in languages with lexical tone. Several participants observed that the evidence for this is not very strong: the classical paper on the subject studied a small number of utterances from one speaker in Thai, for example.

So for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™, I wrote a little script that calculates and displays (one way of looking at) these effects in the TIMIT dataset, which includes 10 English sentences spoken by each of 630 speakers. (Specifically, there are two sentences spoken by all 630 speakers;  450 sentences spoken by 7 speakers each; and 1890 sentences spoken by a single speaker.)

I had to go to a meeting before I had a chance to write up the results, but the meeting ended early enough for me to find 15 minutes before lunch, so:

As Eric Baković recently noted, there's been a lot of buzz about a presentation about "uptalk" by Amanda Ritchart and Amalia Arvaniti at the 2013 Acoustical Society meeting. All we have so far is a sort of press release  ("Do We All Speak Like Valley Girls? Uptalk in Southern Californian English", ASA Lay Language Papers, 12/5/2013), but this is enough to see that Ritchart and Arvaniti have made a valuable contribution.

They based their analysis on systematic analysis of a good-sized recorded dataset (23 "native speakers of SoCal English", who were asked to describe a muted video clip and to participate in a "map task" interaction). They distinguished among different interactional functions ("simple statement", "question", "floor holding", "confirmation request"), they systematically noted aspects of the location and extent of rises, and they based their conclusions on a statistical analysis of the interrelationship of these features.

Yesterday afternoon, UC San Diego Linguistics grad student Amanda Ritchart presented her research (joint with Amalia Arvaniti) on the use and realization of uptalk in Southern California English at the 166th Acoustical Society of America meeting. This work is profiled in the ASA's press room, and has thus far received a fair amount of attention. You can hear and/or read about it on KPBS (San Diego's public radio station), at WBUR's Here & Now, on BBC News, and in the Washington Post. (See also this shout-out on the Linguistic Society of America website.)

Uptalk has been discussed many times here on Language Log, so regular readers are probably not unfamiliar with it. But one of the most recent Language Log posts on the topic ("Uptalk awakening", 9/29/2013) shows how relatively unaware of this long-standing feature of many varieties of English some folks still are. So the media coverage of Ritchart & Arvaniti's work is welcome — and on the whole pretty good, if a little biased toward a "wow, it's spreading to men!" interpretation of the research results, which kinda misses the point. But of course, if you scroll down to the comments (why oh why do I ever scroll down to the comments???), you'll see that many appear to think that the use of rising intonation at the ends of (some!) statements is the clearest evidence we have of the decline of western civilization. Sigh.

Update — more here.

We can read a 10-digit sequence in the style of an American telephone number, 3+3+4 — e.g. 752-955-0354:

Or we could read the same sequence in a 3+2+3+2 pattern, 752-95-503-54:

It won't surprise you to learn that this changes the pattern of average digit durations:

This year's Penn Reading Project book is Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop.  In my discussion group yesterday afternoon, several participants complained that some important things about the "poetics" of rap are lost in a purely textual presentation of the lyrics. One student observed that in pieces he knows, the rhythm is there in the written form — but the lyrics for pieces that he doesn't know seem flat and lifeless in comparison.

There are good reasons that this is more true for the works of Melle Mel or Jay Z than for Elizabeth Barrett Browning or W.H. Auden, I think.

One of the advantages of the weblog format is the combination of text, images, and audio or video clips, so for this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ I decided to present a small exploration of the "poetics of hip hop" in a multimedia — and somewhat quantitative — framework.

This exercise will clarify why transcriptions of the lyrics, even with bold-face indications of stress, are missing an important dimension. The lines' scansion depends not only on the syllable sequence and on where the performer puts phrasal stresses, but also on the alignment of the syllables with the musical meter. This alignment is not automatic or always obvious — it has artistically-relevant degrees of freedom beyond those available in most other genres of text setting.

For those whose appraisal of Bradley's book was (interpreting freely) "not enough vampires and car chases", this will probably make things worse — you have been warned.

One reason that I was so interested in San Duanmu's work on Chinese "elastic words" is that I'm in the middle of reading Perry Link's recent book An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics.

During my recent visit to Michigan, San Duanmu told me about some really neat work that he published last year as "Word-length preferences in Chinese: a corpus study", Journal of East Asian Linguistics 21.1: 89-114, 2012.

Following up on "Versing" (6/19/2012)  and "Vers(e|u)s" (6/20/2012), here are the perception-test results from the 56 people who sent me their answers before I posted the answer key.

Some overall statistics follow.

Like other regular readers of Andrew Sullivan's web log, I was not surprised that he was happy about Sarah Palin's decision not to run for U.S. president in 2012. However, one aspect of his commentary ("Rejoice!", 10/5/2011) did surprise me. The puzzle is in the second sentence:

Our Three Year National Nightmare Is Over!

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one).

Mark Levin is a radio talk show host, and Sullivan's link goes to a page on Levin's web site that includes not only the text of Palin's statement, but also accesses an mp3 file of a 15-minute segment of his show. My interest here, of course, is not in the politics but in the phonetics. Is it really true that Sarah Palin's voice is deeper (i.e. lower in pitch) than Mark Levin's?