An acoustic study on the paralinguistic prosody in the politeness talk in Taiwan Mandarin

The relationship between the interlocutors is known, in Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, to be influential on speakers’ tone of voice. This study examined this phenomenon from acoustical aspects by measuring the duration and pitch of the dialogues made by pairs of talkers. Shorter word duration is found between strangers’ dialogues and lower pitch register is found in female talkers’ speech to males. The findings indicate that the prosody of talkers indeed varies with their familiarity with hearers and also with hearers’ gender.