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22 Nov 2005
Ioulia Grichkovtsova (QMUC)
Affective Speech in Scottish English and French: monolingual vs. bilingual children
The main objective of this research is to investigate the production of affective speech by bilingual and monolingual children cross-linguistically. Recent cross-linguistic studies show that there is a number of available means to express emotions in speech (pitch range, rhythm, voice quality, etc), but their usage, level of importance and meaning vary in different languages. Crosscultural and cross-linguistic differences in affective speech may lead bilingual children to perceive and to express emotions differently in their two different languages. Given that bilingual children produce two languages that differ in some acoustic correlates for affective speech, it is likely that they may differ in their production of affective speech from the monolinguals in each of their two languages. This phenomenon has been widely attested in bilingual studies of other phonetic aspects.
A cross-linguistically comparable corpus of 6 bilingual Scottish-French children and 12 monolingual peers, aged between 7 and 10, was recorded according to the developed methodology. This talk presents results on pitch range, peak alignment and speech rate for four bilingual children and their eight monolingual peers, comparing their emotions and languages. The results show that bilingual children differentiate some emotions across their languages; happiness is the only emotion, which is differentiated by all the bilingual children. The majority of children (both bilingual and monolingual) realize differences between some emotions in each of the measurements, taken in this study. Monolingual children use analysed acoustic parameters in a much more homogeneous way than bilinguals. Some results of bilingual children do not strictly correspond to those of monolinguals. Having a wider range of means and ways for affective realizations, bilinguals may represent a particular group of speakers who express vocal emotions in a different manner than monolinguals.
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