Abstract

Apart from semantic meanings, what kinds of social meanings do listeners extract from spoken language production? Research on the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities, such as creaky voice, is biased toward North American English and a handful of other Indo-European languages. In this talk, I will report findings of collaborative work examining the social meanings of creaky voice in Mandarin Chinese for mainland Chinese listeners. Using a large set of resynthesized stimuli including pairs of utterances differing only in voice quality, we recruited Mandarin listeners to complete a social perception experiment in which they collectively evaluated 38 talkers (presented in creaky or modal voice quality) on socio-demographic dimensions (age, gender, sexuality, education) and traits related to personality (e.g., confident, genuine, pretentious) and communicative style (e.g., engaging). Results indicated multiple effects of creaky voice on the perception of talker age, gender, and warmth; further, these effects interacted with both talker gender and listener gender, in ways that often differed from previously documented patterns for North American English. I will discuss implications for understanding the socio-indexicality of creaky voice in Mandarin and for designing future research on the social meanings of non-modal voice qualities.

Biography

Prof. Charles B. Chang is Professor of Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), where he directs the Phonetics, Acquisition & Multilingualism Lab (PAMLab) group. He joins CityU after professorial appointments at Boston University, SOAS University of London, and Rice University and visiting fellowships at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development (Western Sydney University) and the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing (LMU Munich). Funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, his research focuses on phonetic and phonological aspects of language learning, multilingualism, and language attrition in diverse populations of language users (including novice learners, heritage speakers, and long-term expatriates) with a view toward sharpening our understanding of linguistic knowledge and making linguistic theory more inclusive and accessible. Links to publications can be found on his website at cbchang.com.