Production, perception, and communicative goals of American newscaster speech

• Published in: Language in society Vol. 48; no. 2; pp. 233 - 259
• Main Authors: Gasser, Emily, Ahn, Byron, Napoli, Donna Jo, Zhou, Z.L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.04.2019
• Subjects: American English; Annotations; Audio equipment; Authority; Broadcasting; Charisma; Conversation; Credibility; Experiments; Hypotheses; Intuition; Listeners; News; News media; Pitch; Prosody; Speech; Speech perception; Verbal communication
• ISSN: 0047-4045; 1469-8013
• DOI: 10.1017/S0047404518001392

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*