Correlations Between Vowel Lengths and Emotion in Narratives

<p>This paper looks at the relationship between emotion and vowel length in spontaneous speech, specifically during narratives. It is hypothesized that during emotionally-laden speech, vowel length will be longer in duration than when in non-emotional speech. Data is drawn from the Univerisity of California, Santa Barbara linguistic corpus, with conversations focused on individuals in and around Southern California. The paper builds on work by Dabbs et al., Banse & Scherer, Estes & Adelman, and others regarding the nature of cognitive monitoring, as well as stance as discussed by Ochs & Schieffelin, Ochs, Kärkkainen, Local & Walker, and how emotion is displayed in speech.</p> <p>Tokens chosen for analysis are /ɑ/, /ɑɪ/, and /ə/. Three of each token in first syllable position is collected for analysis from both emotional and non-emotional speech. Analysis of tokens then takes place by (mean) averaging each token's length for each speaker in each stance, then the total vowel average time is calculated again for each speaker in each stance. Beyond intra-vowel, intra-speaker averages, inter-speaker average is calculated to assess consistency of the vowel length changes between stances. The paper finds that the length of tokens shows an average increase during intraspeaker emotional speech.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts in English Composition

Level thesis:degree_level

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2015

Author dc:creator

• Diaz, Brett Anthony

Contributors dc:contributor

• Vickers, Caroline

• Emotion
• narrative
• conversation
• vowel length
• stance
• Applied Linguistics
• Discourse and Text Linguistics
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/240

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu:etd-1262