Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T23:40:27.892Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Production, perception, and communicative goals of American newscaster speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2019

Emily Gasser ,
Byron Ahn ,
Donna Jo Napoli  and
Z.L. Zhou
Emily Gasser*
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, USA
Byron Ahn
Affiliation:
Princeton University, USA
Donna Jo Napoli
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, USA
Z.L. Zhou
Affiliation:
University of California Los Angeles, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Emily Gasser, Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 233 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Many thanks to Lynne Steuerle Schofield, Kate Collins, Colleen Cotter, Dan Steele, Shuang Guan, and our twelve volunteer readers for their feedback and assistance with this project.

References

REFERENCES

Ahn, Byron; Gasser, Emily; Napoli, Donna Jo; & Zhou, Z.L. (2018). Prosodic features of newscaster intonation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, ms.Google Scholar
Arrabito, G. Robert (2009). Effects of talker sex and voice style of verbal cockpit warnings on performance. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 51(1):3–20.Google Scholar
Bachorowski, Jo-Anne, & Owren, Michael (1999). Acoustic correlates of talker sex and individual talker identity are present in a short vowel segment produced in running speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106(2):1054–63.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary; Hirschberg, Julia; & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stephanie (2005). The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.), Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing, vol. 1, 9–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2):145–204.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Biadsy, Fadi; Rosenberg, Andrew; Carlson, Rolf; Hirschberg, Julia; & Strangert, Eva (2008). A cross-cultural comparison of American, Palestinian, and Swedish perception of charismatic speech. Speech Prosody 37:579–82.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David (2017). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.33. Online: http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight (1982). The network tone of voice. Journal of Broadcasting 26:726–28.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight (1989). Intonation and its uses: Melody in grammar and discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Brooke, Mark E., & Ng, Sik Hung (1986). Language and social influence in small conversational groups. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 5(3):201–210.Google Scholar
Castro, Luciana; Serridge, Ben; de Moraes, João Antônio; & Freitas, Myrian (2010). The prosody of the TV news speaking style in Brazilian Portuguese. In Botinis, Antonis (ed.), Proceedings of the Third ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics: ExLing 2010, 17–20. Athens: International Speech Communication Association.Google Scholar
Chattopadhyay, Amitava; Dahl, Darren W.; Ritchie, Robin J. B.; & Shahin, Kimary N. (2003). Hearing voices: The impact of announcer speech characteristics on consumer response to broadcast advertising. Journal of Consumer Psychology 13(3):198–204.Google Scholar
Chebat, Jean-Charles; Hedhli, Kamel El; Gélinas-Chebat;, Claire & Boivin, Robert (2007). Voice and persuasion in a banking telemarketing context. Perceptual and Motor Skills 104(2):419–37.Google Scholar
Cohler, David Keith (1985). Broadcast journalism: A guide for the presentation of radio and television news. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Cotter, Colleen (1989). Some pragmatic considerations of broadcast prosody. Sussex: University of Sussex MA dissertation.Google Scholar
Cotter, Colleen (1993). Prosodic aspects of broadcast news register. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 19(1):90–100.Google Scholar
Cotter, Colleen (1999). Five facts about the Fourth Estate. In Wheeler, Rebecca S. (ed.), The workings of language: From prescriptions to perspective, 165–79. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Cotter, Colleen (2010). News talk: Investigating the language of journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Edworthy, J.; Hellier, E.; & Rivers, J. (2003). The use of male or female voices in warnings systems: A question of acoustics. Noise and Health 6:39–50.Google Scholar
Elbert, Sarah P., & Dijkstra, Arie (2014). An experimental test of the relationship between voice intonation and persuasion in the domain of health. Psychology & Health 29(9):1014–31.Google Scholar
Escudero, David; González, César; Gutiérrez, Yurena; & Rodero, Emma (2017). Identifying characteristic prosodic patterns through the analysis of the information of Sp_ToBI label sequences. Computer Speech & Language 45:39–57.Google Scholar
Gélinas-Chebat, Claire; Chebat;, Jean-Charles & Vaninsky, Alexander (1996). Voice and advertising: Effects of intonation and intensity of voice on source credibility, attitudes toward the advertised service and the intent to buy. Perceptual and Motor Skills 83(1):243–62.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Harry (1940). Reading and listening comprehension at various controlled rates. New York: Teachers College Columbia University dissertation.Google Scholar
Grable, John E., & Britt, S. L. (2011). A test of the video narration effect on financial risk-tolerance assessment. Journal of Financial Planning. Online: https://www.onefpa.org/journal/Pages/A%20Test%20of%20the%20Video%20Narration%20Effect%20on%20Financial%20Risk-Tolerance%20Assessment.aspx.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Helfrich, Hede, & Wallbott, Harald G. (1986). Contributions of the German ‘expression psychology’ to nonverbal behavior research, part IV: The voice. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 10:187–204.Google Scholar
Iivonen, Antti; Niemi, Tuija; & Paananen, Minna (1995). Comparison of prosodic characteristics in English, Finnish and German radio and TV newscasts. ICPhS 95:382–85.Google Scholar
Johns-Lewis, Catherine (1986). Prosodic differentiation of discourse modes. In Johns-Lewis, Catherine (ed.), Intonation in discourse, 199–220. San Diego, CA: College-Hill Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Brian K., & Hunter, Marsha (2009). The articulate advocate: New techniques of persuasion for trial lawyers. Prescott, AZ: Crown King Books.Google Scholar
Jones, Benedict C.; Feinberg, David R.; DeBruine, Lisa M.; Little;, Anthony C. & Vukovic, Jovana (2010). A domain-specific opposite-sex bias in human preferences for manipulated voice pitch. Animal Behaviour 79:57–62.Google Scholar
Krauss, Ellis S. (2000). Broadcasting politics in Japan: NHK and television news. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Medrado, Reny; Ferreira;, Leslie Piccolotto & Behlau, Mara (2005). Voice-over: Perceptual and acoustic analysis of vocal features. Journal of Voice 19(3):340–49.Google Scholar
Miller, Norman; Maruyama, Geoffrey; Beaber;, Rex J. & Valone, Keith (1976). Speed of speech and persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34(4):615–24.Google Scholar
Ohala, John J. (1984). An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 in voice. Phonetica 41:1–16.Google Scholar
Ohala, John J. (1994). The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch. In Hinton, Leanne, Nichols, Johanna, & Ohala, John (eds.), Sound symbolisms, 325–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ostendorf, Mari; Price, Patti; & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie (1996). Boston University radio speech corpus, LDC96S36. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet, & Hirschberg, Julia (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Cohen, Philip R., Morgan, Jerry L., & Pollack, Martha E. (eds.), Intentions in communication, 271–311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pittam, Jeffery (1990). The relationship between perceived persuasiveness of nasality and source characteristics for Australian and American listeners. The Journal of Social Psychology 130:81–87.Google Scholar
Price, Jennifer (2008). New news old news: A sociophonetic study of spoken Australian English in news broadcast speech. AAA-Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 33(2):285–310.Google Scholar
Raymond, Geoffrey (2000). The voice of authority: The local accomplishment of authoritative discourse in live news broadcasts. Discourse Studies 2(3):354–79.Google Scholar
Rodero, Emma (2006). Analysis of intonation in news presentation on television. In Botinis, Antonis (ed.), Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics: ExLing 2006, 209–12. Athens: International Speech Communication Association.Google Scholar
Rodero, Emma (2015). The principle of distinctive and contrastive coherence of prosody in radio news: An analysis of perception and recognition. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 39:79–92.Google Scholar
Rodero, Emma; Larrea, Olatz; & Vázquez, Marina (2010). Voces masculinas y femeninas en la locución de cuñas publicitarias: Estudio sobre la efectividad y su adecuación al producto. Icono 14(4):281–94.Google Scholar
Rodero, Emma; Mas, Lluis; & Blanco, Maria (2014). The influence of prosody on politicians’ credibility. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 11(1):91–113.Google Scholar
Rodero Antón, Emma (2013). Peculiar styles when narrating the news: The intonation of radio news bulletins. Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 19(1):519–32.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Andrew, & Hirschberg, Julia (2005). Acoustic/prosodic and lexical correlates of charismatic speech. Interspeech 2005:513–16.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Andrew, & Hirschberg, Julia (2009). Charisma perception from text and speech. Speech Communication 51(7):640–55.Google Scholar
Schafer, Amy Jean (1997). Prosodic parsing: The role of prosody in sentence comprehension. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation.Google Scholar
Schüppert, Anja; Hilton, Nanna H.; Gooskens, Charlotte; & Heuven, Vincent J. (2012). Syllable deletion in contemporary Danish. Copenhagen Studies in Language 42:73–99.Google Scholar
van der Vaart, Wander; Ongena, Yfke; Hoogendoorn, Adriaan; & Dijkstra, Wil (2006). Do interviewers’ voice characteristics influence cooperation rates in telephone surveys? International Journal of Public Opinion Research 18:488–99.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo (1984). Impartial speech: Observations on the intonation of radio newsreaders. Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 2(1):84–98.Google Scholar
Vermillion, Patricia (2004). Using prosodic completion tasks to explore the phonetics and phonology of intonation. Proceedings of the Tenth Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 415–19. Online: http://assta.org/sst/2004/proceedings/papers/sst2004-174.pdf; accessed 12 July 2017.Google Scholar
Vermillion, Patricia (2006). Aspects of New Zealand English intonation and its meanings: An experimental investigation of forms and contrasts. Online: http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/791; accessed 12 July 2017.Google Scholar
Wheatley, Katherine E. (1949). Anomalies of radio speech. American Speech 24(3):213–15.Google Scholar
Whipple, Thomas W., & McManamon, Mary K. (2002). Implications of using male and female voices in commercials: An exploratory study. Journal of Advertising 31:79–91.Google Scholar
Wynn, Earl R. (1974). Performing. In Hilliard, Robert L. (ed.), Radio broadcasting, an introduction to the sound medium. New York: Hastings House.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, Miron, & Miyake, Kunitate (1993). The attractive voice: What makes it so? Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 17(2):119–35.Google Scholar