The phonetic profile of Korean formal and informal speech registers

Authors

Bodo Winter

Sven Grawunder

Doi
Abstract

In this exploratory sociophonetic study, we investigated the properties of formal and informal speech registers in Korean. We found that in formal speech, Korean male and female speakers lowered their average fundamental frequency and pitch range. The acoustic signal furthermore exhibited overall less variability, as evidenced by decreased fundamental frequency and intensity standard deviations, and decreased period and amplitude perturbations. Differences in speech registers affected Harmonics-to-Noise-ratio and the difference between the first and second harmonic as well, suggesting breathiness-related changes, and the speech was slower and included more non-lexical fillers such as ah and oh. Unexpectedly, formality also affected breathing patterns, leading to a noticeable increase in the amount of loud “hissing” breath intakes in formal speech. We thus show that a variety of different means of vocal expression play a role in signaling formality in Korean. Further, we outline the implications of this study for phonetic theory and discuss our results with respect to the Frequency Code and research on clear speech.

1 Description

subject

Subject unique identifier (categorical).

gender

Gender of subject (categorical).

birthplace

Birth place of subject (categorical).

musicstudent

Does the subject have music training? (binary: yes, no)

scenario

Unique identifier of different items.

task

Task type (categorical: not = mailbox task vs dct = discourse completion task). In the mailbox task people left a note on somebody’s mailbox, while in the discourse completion task they were prompted to role-play the start of a conversation.

attitude

Attitude (binary: pol polite vs inf informal).

total_duration

Total duration of utterances in seconds (numeric).

articulation_rate

Number of syllables per second (numeric).

f0mn

Mean fundamental frequency (f0) (numeric).

f0sd

Stadard deviation of fundamental frequency (numeric).

f0range

Minimum and maximum fundamental frequency (numeric).

inmn

Mean intensity (numeric).

insd

Standard deviation of intensity (numeric).

inrange

Minimum and maximum fundamental frequency (numeric).

shimmer

Local shimmer (likewise normalized amplitude difference of consecutive periods) (numeric).

jitter

Local jitter (bsolute period-to-period difference divided by the average period) (numeric).

HNRmn

Mean Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio (numeric).

H1H2

Difference between first and second harmonic (H1-H2) (numeric).

breath_count

Number of audible breath intakes (count).

filler_count

Number of oral fillers like “oh/ah” (count).

hiss_count

Number of noisy breath intakes (count).

nasal_count

Number of nasal fillers like “mh/nh” (count).

sil_count

Number of silent pauses (count).

ya_count

Number of occurences of interjection “ya” (informal) (count).

yey_count

Number of occurences of interjection “yey” (polite) (count).