Prosodic mitigation characterizes Catalan formal speech: The Frequency Code reassessed

Preschoolers use prosodic mitigation strategies to encode polite stance

“…However, there was an interaction between cost and age, so that only the older children produced less intensity, less jitter, more shimmer and more F1-F2 (correlate for breathiness) and near-significantly lower pitch height. Comparing these findings to results found for Catalan-speaking adults [4], it would seem that 5-year-old children can make use of much the same prosodic cues of mitigation as adults (except for shimmer). However, because [4] analysed adult politeness in interactions with only one social parameter, power distance (what we have called social distance), the results of the two studies are not strictly comparable.…”

“…Recent research on the interface between prosody and politeness has analysed different kinds of prosodic cues like pitch as well as intensity, syllable duration and voice quality (jitter, shimmer and H2-H1 as an index of breathiness). In Catalan, for example, a reduction in pitch height, longer syllable duration, less intensity, a decrease in jitter and shimmer, and an increase in H2-H1 have all been found to be linked to politeness marking [2,4]. Similar findings have been made for Korean [3].…”

“…PRAAT [23] (Boersma & Weenink, 2017) was used for the prosodic coding and notes were entered manually in an Excel spreadsheet for the lexical and morphosyntactic coding. From the literature on the expression of politeness in Catalan (see [4], [24] and [25]), we know that there are a number of ways requests can be modified in order to make them less face-threatening and that adults do so depending on the imposition of the request (cost) and the social distance between speakers.…”

“…Prosodic coding: The prosodic coding was carried out based on [4]'s study on the prosodic correlates of mitigation in Catalan formal register. First, a set of manual annotations were added to the PRAAT output, as follows:…”

“…Lexical and morphological coding: According to the literature on Catalan [4,22,23], politeness is conveyed in requests by means of (1) indirect speech act types (direct directive: Vull això 'I want this' vs. indirect directive: Em dones això? 'Can you give that to me?…”