SOME ASPECTS OF PROSODY OF FRIENDLY FORMAL AND FRIENDLY INFORMAL SPEAKING STYLES

The current study investigates acoustic correlates associated with friendly formal and friendly informal speaking styles. A small corpus of speech was recorded by a native speaker of American English. The results revealed that that the most distinctive feature differentiating the two styles is the fundamental frequency. There was also a small difference found in the articulation rate and RMS energy between the two styles. the work carried in the field of phonetics with the work carried by sociolinguists. This paper presents the results of acoustic study of friendly formal and friendly informal speaking styles (referred to from here onwards as "formal" and "informal") obtained from one American English speaker. Despite claims in (3) that actors' speech is not always optimal for the study of emotions/speaking styles, we used a professional voice talent to record our prompts. This was done simply for the reason that we had previously recorded a neutral style using the same speaker. Two methods are proposed in (5) which can be used for eliciting expressive speech using actors - elements from both of these were used in the recording of the corpus. We also conducted a perceptual cross-validation study to assure that an intended speaking style is recognised as such and discarded samples that were not perceived as intended. Our hypotheses were that the informal style is characterised by a wider pitch range and faster rate of articulation. We also expected to have a higher average number of intermediate phrases per intonational phrase in the informal style compared to the formal style - a finding which is reported in (4).