LINGUIST List 5.240

Wed 02 Mar 1994

Qs: Imitation, Gender differences, Idiom, UPen corpus

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Directory

1. , Imitation and impersonation
2. , Query: What makes a boy sound like a boy and not a girl...?
3. , Idiom question
4. Kate Joly, UPen corpus

I'm looking for references/sources/anecdotes relating to imitation and
impersonation of human speech and speakers by human speakers. This includes
cognitive, neurophysiological, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic
processes, as well as perceptual/productional phonetics, language
acquisition and accent acquisition.

ANY information from these areas relating to imitation and impersonation
phenomena, processes and abilities would be greatly appreciated.

Duncan Markham
******************
Duncan.Markhamling.lu.se
Dept of Linguistics and Phonetics (Phonetics Section)
Lund University, Sweden.

Hello!

I am a postgraduate student working at Edinburgh, Scotland, UK and my
research topic is "Acoustic gender differences in the speech of 4 - 5
year old children". I'm aware of the many differences in LANGUAGE
between boys and girls at an early age, however relatively little
work has been done on the actual sounds of their speech.

Research has shown that adult listeners can tell the differences
between boys and girls at this age. The balance of opinion is that
there are no major physiological differences between the sexes as
regards the vocal organs prior to puberty, so if there is an acoustic
difference between the voices of the sexes (which there must be if
adults can perceive a difference) then it must be due to other
factors. What is the difference? Does it manifest itself in formant
frequency differences? or fundamental frequency differences?

Rates of correct gender judgements depend partly on the type of speech
sample, but are 70_75% at best. Why are some children identified
better than others?

What are the implications for theories of language acquisition?

Are there any linguists or sociologists out there who might like to
comment, or can anyone give me any references (I already have lots,
but the more the merrier...). I'm uncertain at the moment of what
theoretical standpoint I intend to adopt - this issue can be
approached from the view of language acquisition or Nature vs. Nurture
or a theory of voice quality....

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Moray Nairn

e-mail: spnairmain.qmced.ac.uk

Can anyone give me any information on the idiomatic expression "My withers are
unwrung"? It seems to mean something like "This doesn't upset me", but I'm
not sure. How about its etymology? It doesn't seem to have anything to do
with horses or laundry.

Thanks,
 -- Al Huettner

I'm trying to find out if it's true that UPen has a large, public-domain
corpus of sentences tagged with things like part of speech information.
If anyone knows anything about it, can correct me in any way, or can
tell me who to ask about it, I would be grateful.

- Kate Joly