Loudness trumps pitch in politeness judgments: Evidence from Korean

Abstract

Politeness is a vital aspect of everyday life that is receiving increased attention in sociophonetic research. The current study investigated how deferential and intimate stances, examples of politeness-related expressions, are conveyed by phonetic cues in Korean. Previously, we found that Korean listeners can distinguish these stances based on speech acoustics alone. The current study manipulated fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of spoken Korean utterances to investigate the specific role of these cues in politeness judgments. Across three experiments with a total of 63 Korean listeners, we found that intensity reliably influenced politeness judgments, but F0 did not. An examination of individual differences revealed that all listeners interpreted deferential stances to be associated with low intensity: quiet utterances were perceived as deferential. On the other hand, the interpretation of F0 varied across listeners: some perceived high-pitched utterances as deferential and others perceived low-pitched utterances as deferential. These results present a challenge to the Frequency Code as a universal principle underlying politeness phenomena. The results also indicate that perception does not perfectly mirror production in politeness expressions in Korean, since previous production studies have reliably found low pitch to be associated with deferential stances.