Too Cute for Words: An Investigation of Prosody's Role in the Construction of Aegyo as a Speech Style

Research suggests that prosody can be used by speakers to convey a variety of information to listeners. The present study attempts to investigate how prosody might play a role in the construction of aegyo, a Korean term for a type of charming, cute behavior that may refer to both linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior. The focus of this study was the speech style which uses linguistic features stereotyped as conveying cuteness or charm. To test the hypothesis that there is a significant prosodic difference between aegyo and non-aegyo, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, subjects read aloud passages in Korean that were constructed to elicit contrastive speech performances. The subjects’ performance was expected to exhibit more or less aegyo depending on the context information embedded in the passages. While there was a significant difference between the mean pitch of utterances for two out of the three subjects, there was no significant difference between the pitch range and mean absolute slopes of contrastive utterances. Additionally, analyses revealed that seven of the nine widely recognized K-ToBI IP-final boundary tones occurred in both aegyo and non-aegyo utterances. In Experiment 2, two judges listened to and evaluated the clips of utterances derived from recordings made in Experiment 1. Despite some subjectivity in judging, there was a high level of concordance between the judges. The study concluded that there was some evidence, at least in the case of mean pitch, suggesting a prosodic difference between aegyo and non-aegyo speech. Due to the fact that very few subjects participated, it was concluded that the results could not be used to make inferences about other populations and that the study should be replicated in the future with a larger number of subjects. FA C U LT Y M E N T O R : B R E T T K E S S L E R , P H . D. A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R O F P S YC H O L O G Y