Claire Byrd
Research Mentor(s): Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya
Mentor Department: Romance Languages and Literatures
Authors: Claire Byrd, Nicholas Henriksen, Lorenzo García-Amaya
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Oral
Abstract
This study explores the social perception of falsetto voice in Western Andalusian Spanish (WAS), spoken in southern Spain. Previous research has investigated the social consequences of acoustic properties across world languages and within Iberian Spanish, however few have focused on the measure of voice quality, specifically falsetto voice. Distinguished by its high pitch, falsetto voice occurs in many languages in varying capacities. A pilot study found its appearance in WAS is restricted to interactional settings and short bursts, rather than across entire utterances. The present study aims to elucidate what social interpretations speakers of WAS place upon these falsetto occurrences. A survey will be sent to a sample of 100 native WAS speakers. Participants will be asked to listen to 30 audio recordings of short sentences, 15 with a falsetto-containing word and 15 without, and answer a series of questions about each stimulus. Questions fall into three categories: (i) geographic information, in which the participant will judge what region/city of Spain the speaker in the audio came from; (ii), social information, in which the participant will rate the speaker on characteristics such as gender and socioeconomic status; and (iii), social purposes, in which the participant will express their level of agreement with whether the speaker was communicating five specific extralinguistic intentions. The social purposes framework was adopted from cross-linguistic research into falsetto voice, where seven of nine proposed purposes are targeted in the survey questions: intense emotion, imitation without intent to mock, imitation with intent to mock, calling attention, distance communication, concealing identity, and concealing location. Results are forthcoming, and we expect to find that judgments across these three dimensions for the falsetto-containing stimuli will differ from those for the modal stimuli. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the social indexical properties of acoustic phenomena, and the complexities of linguistic variation within European Spanish.
