Frequency of Adjectives in Male and Female Speech in the Contemporary Television Drama Series "Homeland"

The paper addresses issues related to language and gender, and discusses research on the frequency of adjectives in language of male and female characters in a TV drama series “Homeland”. The empirical part of the study uses as its theoretical background the classic works in the field (Lakoff 1975; Butler 1990; Meyerhoff 2006), which identify gender specific language features and define factors that determine male-female language differences. The research was conducted manually, with minor help of electronic tools, on a personally created language corpus consisting of dialogue lines from the TV show. The results clearly show that the frequency of adjectives in female speech is higher than in male speech in the studied corpus

Associations of Habitual Sleep Duration and Sleep Stages With Speech-in-Noise Performance

Speech-in-noise performance involves central auditory and cortical processing and is fundamental to communication. We investigated cross-temporal associations of habitual sleep duration and stages (1996-1998) with speech-in-noise performance (2016-2017) in a subset of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study participated in the Sleep Heart Health Study(N=755, 61±5 years, 53% female). Speech-in-noise performance was measured by Quick Speech-in-Noise Test; range:0-30; lower scores=worse performance. Time spent in each stage (stage 1;2;3/4;rapid eye movement (REM)) was measured by polysomnography. Habitual sleep duration was calculated by self-reported duration on weekdays and weekends. In models adjusting for demographic and disease covariates, every 10-minute increase in REM sleep was associated with better speech-in-noise performance (0.10 points,95% CI:0.00,0.21); every 1-hour increase in habitual sleep duration was associated with worse speech-in-noise performance (-1.28 points,95% CI:-2.49,-0.08) among participants sleep >8 hours. Long sleep duration might be a risk marker of speech-in-noise performance, but REM sleep might be a protective factor.

“O'erwhelmed with noise”: Abject Female Speech in Epicene; or, The Silent Woman

This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.

‘DAY WATCH’ OR BAYWATCH? A NOTE ON ΗΜΕΡΟΣΚΟΠΟΣ (AR. LYS. 849)

This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus. By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates’) become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever.

Anthroponyms as Address in Japanese

The article aims to study of anthroponyms as a reference in Japanese. Anthroponyms as forms of circulation and their functioning in the modern literary Japanese language were described and the socio-psychological factors influencing the choice of a certain form of appeal were considered as well as functional shifts in the system of forms of circulation of the Japanese language were investigated. The purpose of this study to describe and analyze the anthroponymic forms of addressing. On selecting material for the study, the method of random sampling was used. The article concludes that there is some difference in the use of anthroponyms as an address of the male and female speech versions of the language.

Effect of Mouth Mask and Face Shield on Speech Spectrum in Slovak Language

In this paper, with the aim of assessing the deterioration of speech intelligibility caused by a speaker wearing a mask, different face masks (surgical masks, FFP2 mask, homemade textile-based protection and two kinds of plastic shields) are compared in terms of their acoustic filtering effect, measured by placing the mask on an artificial head/mouth simulator. For investigating the additional effects on the speaker’s vocal output, speech was also recorded while people were reading a text when wearing a mask, and without a mask. In order to discriminate between effects of acoustic filtering by the mask and mask-induced effects of vocal output changes, the latter was monitored by measuring vibrations at the suprasternal notch, using an attached accelerometer. It was found that when wearing a mask, people tend to slightly increase their voice level, while when wearing plastic face shield, they reduce their vocal power. Unlike the Lombard effect, no significant change was found in the spectral content. All face mask and face shields attenuate frequencies above 1–2 kHz. In addition, plastic shields also increase frequency components to around 800 Hz, due to resonances occurring between the face and the shield. Finally, special attention was given to the Slavic languages, in particular Slovak, which contain a large variety of sibilants. Male and female speech, as well as texts with and without sibilants, was compared.

Case Report: Women, Be Aware that Your Vocal Charisma can Dwindle in Remote Meetings

Remote meetings via Zoom, Skype, or Teams limit the range and richness of nonverbal communication signals. Not just because of the typically sub-optimal light, posture, and gaze conditions, but also because of the reduced speaker visibility. Consequently, the speaker’s voice becomes immensely important, especially when it comes to being persuasive and conveying charismatic attributes. However, to offer a reliable service and limit the transmission bandwidth, remote meeting tools heavily rely on signal compression. It has never been analyzed how this compression affects a speaker’s persuasive and overall charismatic impact. Our study addresses this gap for the audio signal. A perception experiment was carried out in which listeners rated short stimulus utterances with systematically varied compression rates and techniques. The scalar ratings concerned a set of charismatic speaker attributes. Results show that the applied audio compression significantly influences the assessment of a speaker’s charismatic impact and that, particularly female speakers seem to be systematically disadvantaged by audio compression rates and techniques. Their charismatic impact decreases over a larger range of different codecs; and this decrease is additionally also more strongly pronounced than for male speakers. We discuss these findings with respect to two possible explanations. The first explanation is signal-based: audio compression codecs could be generally optimized for male speech and, thus, degrade female speech more (particularly in terms of charisma-associated features). Alternatively, the explanation is in the ears of the listeners who are less forgiving of signal degradation when rating female speakers’ charisma.

METACOMMUNICATIVE PRAGMATIC MARKERS: GENDER ASPECT

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (slushay / u menya net deneg <look / I have no money>); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.

Prosodic rhythm in Australian English (Gender differentiation)

This paper develops the concept of rhythmic classes through the approaches based on metrics designed to quantify speech rhythm. The emergence of a number of PC software packages, that considerably facilitate the analysis of a speech signal, inspired linguists to renew their interest in speech rhythm which waned when Rhythm Class Hypothesis did not prove to be supported with experimental data. New approaches to speech rhythm study are based on the so-called rhythmic metrics – the Deltas, the PVIs and those based on voice timing which are viewed as acoustic rhythmic correlates. Thus, the idea of the paper is to test within the scope of one study the validity of all the three methods using the material of Australian English. The paper also aims at analyzing rhythmical patterns of Australian English, comparing the obtained data with the results on other varieties of English and finding out whether the gender factor has any influence on Australian English speech rhythm. The evaluation of the research data testifies to the ability of each of the three methods to be quite reliable in quantifying speech-rhythm differences. The profiles of the metrics provide acoustic evidence for gender differentiation in Australian English speech rhythm with female speech being more stress-timed.