1. Investigating Fundamental Frequency Shifts in Japanese Female Bilingual Speakers
By Zoltan Boka
IRB and Bioethics Director
Lehman College, New York
Zoltan.boka@gmail.com
Introduction Results
Objectives
References
Conclusion
Methods
Clinicians are often asked to make judgments
about speech perception and production
abilities of non-native speakers. Recently (e.g.
Natour and Wingate 2008) a focus developed on
exploring the F0 characteristics of bilingual
speakers and whether the speaker F0 shifts
between L2 and Ln.
Japanese female bilinguals are an interesting
group because they make an effort to raise
their pitch when speaking Japanese (Ohara
2001) in a bid to conform to cultural
expectations that women should speak with a
higher pitch.
.
The research question was
whether this behavior would occur
in a speaker who grew up in a
Western society where Western
expectations replaced Japanese
ones.
A Japanese native who
immigrated to the U.S. in
childhood and who had no health
issues related to voice, speech,
language or hearing, was asked
to read four sentences (English-
Japanese-English-Japanese)
and her F0’s were recorded and
analyzed via Praat.
There was a clear preference for
raising the English F0. This could
mean that the participant was trying to
conform (even unconsciously) to what
she saw as a Western
norm/expectation.
Future work should explore whether
these shifts are at all dependent on
the perceived social and cultural
status of the person participating in
the experiment with the volunteer.
References:
Natour Y.S. & Wingate J.M. (2008).
Fundamental frequency characteristics of
Jordanian Arabic speakers. Journal of Voice,
23(5), 560-566.
Ohara Y. (2001). Finding one’s voice in Japanese: A
study of the pitch levels of L2 users. In Pavlenko A.,
Brackledge A., Piller I., & Teutsch-Dwyer M. (Eds.),
Multilingualism.