Bilinguals Produce Pitch Range Differently in Their Two Languages to Convey Social Meaning.
Elisa Passoni, Esther de Leeuw, Erez Levon
PMID 35841158WHAT IT FOUND
Japanese-English bilinguals spoke English with a higher pitch and narrower span than Japanese.
In English, masculine-identifying women and feminine-identifying men used the lowest pitches. In Japanese, pitch varied by the addressee's status and gender, not the speaker's identity.
Key findings
01Bilinguals produced English with a higher mean fundamental frequency (pitch level) than Japanese, regardless of their sex or testing location.
02In English, female bilinguals who identified as more masculine and male bilinguals who identified as more feminine produced the lowest pitch levels.
03In Japanese, pitch level was influenced by the addressee's formality and sex, with a formal male addressee eliciting a higher pitch than a formal female or informal male addressee.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used read speech rather than spontaneous conversation, which may not reflect natural social interaction. There were no monolingual control groups for comparison. The number of female and male participants was unequal. The finding that English pitch was higher than Japanese contradicts some previous research, suggesting complex factors like stress or confidence may be involved.
Declared interests
Funding was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, and the Queen Mary University of London Postgraduate Research Fund.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret higher pitch in a second language as a sign of vocal abuse or pathology. The study suggests this may be a social or psychological response, such as increased stress or lower confidence when speaking a less dominant language.