Social influences on female speakers' pitch.

摘要

This dissertation discusses two experiments isolating interlocutor influences on females' pitch in conversations. They explore the effects of interlocutor gender and status and conversation topic. Subjects were twelve Caucasian, heterosexual, female college students, speakers of California English. Each spoke with four unfamiliar interlocutors, a female and male peer and professor. In experiment one, solid-minute excerpts from the start of the interview and from two kinds of topic were created for each interview. Median pitch, standard deviation of pitch and 80% pitch range were calculated. In the pooled data, pitch range was significantly larger with female interlocutors compared with males (F(1, 73) = 6.179, p 0.05). Data from several individual subjects echoed this finding or showed larger standard deviations of pitch (both indicating more varied pitches) with females, and two had higher medians with females. These effects may reflect a camaraderie/high engagement politeness style used between American females. Regarding interlocutor status, two subjects had higher median pitches with professors, possibly reflecting deference politeness, and two others had more varied pitches with peers, showing camaraderie with them. Only minimal effects due to topic were found. Experiment two explores whether interlocutors affect speakers' pitches via accommodation, measuring whether two people's pitches correlate within conversations. The level of correlation was measured for all interviews for all three pitch measures in two different ways, using normalized scores based on averages within separate minutes of the interviews, and using a delta measure based on differences between scores from consecutive minutes. It was found that, for the most part, accommodation cannot account for the patterns found in experiment one. However, when significant correlations in individual interviews are grouped together, some patterns arise. Many occurred for median pitch, and more were based on delta measures with female interlocutors while more were based on normalized scores with males. Pitch accommodation is interpreted as reflecting solidarity/camaraderie politeness. The predominance of positive correlations (only a few negative ones were found) in experiment two, in tandem with the heightened variability with females found in experiment one, was taken as evidence of the importance of positive politeness strategies among these female subjects.