What is it about?
A lot of people notice that their voice change when they speak a different language than their mother-tongue. This article presents an experimental research that compares the voices of French speakers speaking English and English speakers speaking French. The goal was to see if one language was spoken on a higher pitch than another regardless of the origin of the speaker.
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Why is it important?
Research on voice variation across languages within individuals is still growing. The originality of this study lies in the fact that it combines an analysis of the voice of speakers in their mother-tongue and their second language, with an analysis of two groups of speakers (English natives vs French natives). It also involves the comparison of three speech styles (reading, video retelling and informal conversation) , and a separate analysis of voiced pauses.
Perspectives
I hope anyone who has noticed this "changing voice" phenomenon will find some valuable information in this article. This research was fun to lead being a French-English bilingual myself. I also hope this article can shed some light on how a common and intuitive observation (having a different voice when speaking another language) can become a research question.
Lucie Drouillet
Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Another voice for another language?, Language Interaction and Acquisition, December 2023, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lia.00018.dro.
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