Intraspeaker Variability of a Professional Lecturer: Ageing, Genre, Pragmatics vs. Voice Acting (Case Study)

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a case study analyzing the intraspeaker variability of the prosodic level a professional lecturer under several factors at play, namely voice ageing, genre, pragmatics, and voice acting. The goal of the study is to establish the range of prosodic variability of David Crystal, a prominent lecturer. The prosodic features analyzed are frequency, intensity, duration, and voice quality; the method used is acoustic analysis. The results not only expand the existing theory on intraspeaker variability due to the newly received voice quality data, but will also serve as a measuring stick for analyzing other lecturers or public speakers. The key study findings comprise the ability of the speaker in question to resist age-related changes and to preserve the control over temporal parameters, pitch range, and harmonic-to-noise-ratio (HNR). The decline in shimmer and jitter values was documented to decrease harshness in voice and express agreeableness in an interview while high NHR values were noticed to accompany lectures. No voice quality parameter changed under the influence of pragmatic intention. Constructing several individual prosodic portraits of a speaker in different age, genre, pragmatics environments allowed for the recreation of the speaker’s prosodic level, but it is the examination of voice acting that proved to be vital as it allows to analyze the wider scope of the speaker’s variability.