Speech style and stereotypical character in Japanese

Abstract

This study shows that ‘‘stereotypical character’’ is necessary to understand Japanese speech communication in addition to existing conceptions such as emotion, communicative strategy, register, and so on. Stereotypical character is here defined as a complex entity, consisting of information about gender, age, social status, physical features, characteristics, and speech style. The necessity of stereotypical character was shown through an auditory experiment involving a total of 70 speech sounds comprised of 15–19 short phrases (mean duration 1.4) selected from recordings of spontaneous speech of four adult female speakers of Japanese. Ten participants were asked to listen to these speech sounds randomly, and to classify them into four speakers. Each of the resulting auditory-perceptual categories was found to contain speech sounds from more than one speaker. Further analyses of these results suggested that the participants classified the speech sounds not according to invariant speaker characteristics but according to virtual stereotypical characters that are common in Japanese society. Therefore, such changeable speaker characteristics as ‘‘busybody’’ ‘‘thoughtful,’’ ‘‘high-handed,’’ and so on, can be elicited through speech sounds by Japanese speakers. [This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sport, and Culture, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), 16202006.]