Question intonation and sex roles

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn order to find out if more women than men use rising intonation when they answer questions to which only they have the answer, 154 men and 16 women were approached by either a male or a female interviewer and asked either where they were born or what their favorite color was. Both sexes used straight rising intonation rarely and equally. Women used a rise–fall–rise pattern more than men only when they were approached by a female interviewer. The ‘meaning’ to the speakers themselves of the three contours used is difficult to ascertain since lexical frames provided by some speakers often contradicted the meanings previously attributed to the contours by other writers.Listeners' associations with the contours were tested with a matched guise tape of three male and three female voices each using each of three contours produced during the interviews (straight fall, straight rise, and rise–fall–rise). Listeners associated simpler rises with more stereotypically feminine attributes; they associated the female voices with feminine attributes regardless of the contour used; and they associated both male and female voices with more stereotypically feminine attributes when the speakers used the straight rise contour. In light of the lack of production evidence in this study to account for the source of these 30 listeners' associations of terminal rises with feminine attributes, some other possibilities are proposed to account for the associational ties. (Sex differences in speech, language attitudes.)