What you say says a lot about who you are

March 2, 2012 Leave a comment


Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns – NYTimes.com.

This New York Times article that came out a couple of days ago (Feb 27, 2012) talks about vocal behaviors characteristic of young women. What relevance does this have to this blog? Well, voice, and the information it conveys is of importance to speech perception. Speech consists of linguistic, or meaningful information. It also contains indexical information, that has to do with things such as talker identity, gender, accent, race, and emotional state. Indexical information can help with the understanding of linguistically relevant information (Nygaard et al., 1994; Nygaard and Pisoni, 1998; Newman and Evers, 2007). For example, the Newman and Evers study showed that when people were familiar with the identity of a talker, i.e., they knew who they were listening to, they were better able to understand what that person was saying (despite the background noise) than when talker identity was not disclosed or made explicit. To summarize, when someone talks, there is a lot more being conveyed that just the linguistically relevant information, and all that extra ‘fluff’ is conveying important information about the talker.

In the context of the article, it is not clear to me how ‘uptalk’ can result in a display of power or authority. I can see it as a trend that people of the same generation indulge in, possibly a subconscious expression of their individuality and an effort to distinguish themselves from how others sound. It does make it somewhat difficult for other, usually older adults to get used to this vocal pattern and understand it. Perhaps, that is the purpose? In any case, next time you listen to someone talk, take a moment to see what ‘indexical’ information you can glean. It is fun!

REFERENCES:

  1. Newman, R. S., and Evers, S. (2007). “The effect of talker familiarity on stream segregation,” Journal of Phonetics 35, 85-103.
  2. Nygaard, L. C., and Pisoni, D.B. (1998). “Talker-specific learning in speech perception,” Perception and Psychophysics 60, 355-376.
  3. Nygaard, L. C., Sommers, M.S., and Pisoni, D.B. (1994). “Speech Perception as a Talker-Contingent Process,” Psychological Science 5, 42-46.
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Filed under Speech Perception, Talker Identification Tagged with , , , ,