The pitch levels of female speech in two Chinese villages.
The pitch levels of female speech in two villages situated in a relatively remote area of China were compared. The dialects spoken in the two villages are similar to Standard Mandarin, and all subjects had learned to read and speak Standard Mandarin at school. Subjects read out a passage of roughly 3.25 min in Standard Mandarin, and pitch values were obtained at 5-ms intervals. The overall pitch levels in the two villages differed significantly, supporting the conjecture that pitch levels of speech are influenced by a mental representation acquired through long-term exposure to the speech of others.
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. ddeutsch@ucsd.edu
Diana
D
Deutsch
Jinghong
J
Le
Jing
J
Shen
Trevor
T
Henthorn
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008875:Middle Aged; D011932:Reading; D012424:Rural Population; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D055815:Young Adult