book notice: Culture and Gender of Voice Pitch: Yuasa

[Harold Schiffman]

Title: Culture and Gender of Voice Pitch: A Sociophonetic Comparison
of the Japanese and Americans
Published: 2008
Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd
               http://www.equinoxpub.com/

Author: Ikuko Patricia Yuasa

Abstract:

The major task of the book is a sociophonetic exploration of voice pitch
characteristics of speakers across the cultures of Japan and America. This
volume makes a cogent argument for the socio-cultural role of voice pitch
in the expression of emotion and politeness and how culture and gender can
intersect with each other. The book tenders acoustic phonetic evidence (as
well as discourse analyses) in construing how an individual's voice pitch
modulation utilized in conversational speech is reflected in this
intersection as it demonstrates several methodological innovations crucial
for sociophonetic research.

Observations of people's voice pitch commonly made impressionistically not
only contributed to this prosodic feature's perceptual stereotypes, but
also inform us about our attitudes towards certain voice pitch
characteristics. This volume includes an extensive review of these
impressionistic remarks and acoustic phonetic investigations of voice pitch
initiated in the early 20th century in the two nations, the latter of which
contributed to both confirming and reconsidering the former. The volume
further alludes to how attitudinal differences between these cultures were
found to surface in the acoustically measured voice pitch modulation
patterns obtained for this volume, stressing that voice pitch is capable of
revealing various socio-cultural aspects of human behaviors.

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
                           Sociolinguistics

Written In: English (eng )

See this book announcement on our website:
http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=38803

http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-3947.html




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