Pitch and pitch range in Maltese and Maltese English speech : a production and perception study

Abstract

This thesis sets out to examine Mean Pitch and Pitch Range in Maltese and Maltese English, building on the findings of Bailey (2016). The study is divided into two parts, a production task and a perception task. The production data collected served two purposes. First, it was used to follow up on Bailey's earlier study on pitch and pitch range in Maltese and Maltese English. The aim was to find out whether the results would differ for spontaneous, as compared to read speech data. Second, the production data was used as the basis for creating stimuli for the perception task. Two perception experiments were run. The first aimed to find out whether Maltese bilinguals are able to correctly judge whether masked stimuli are higher or lower in pitch than a baseline stimulus. The second investigated whether Maltese bilinguals would be able to identify masked stimuli as involving either English or Maltese based on the pitch information.

A brief overview of the Maltese bilingual context is provided. This is followed by a review of the relevant literature on pitch and pitch range research as well as on speech perception, including of a number of studies dealing with pitch perception.

Mean Pitch and Pitch Range in a population of twenty female bilingual speakers aged 18-31 were examined in recordings involving speakers completing a picture-based task. Half the speakers were Maltese dominant and the other Maltese English dominant. Recordings were made whilst speakers completed the task in both Maltese and English. Pitch perception was tested using 2 experiments. Forty Maltese bilingual speakers, also aged 18-31, participated in this part of the study.

The results of the analysis of the production task data show that language dominance seems to affect the overall pitch of each group: ED have a higher mean pitch and wider mean Pitch Range than MD overall. Contrary to what was expected, language dominance does not seem to affect the pitch of each individual speaker when speaking her dominant as compared to her second language. Comparison of the results examining spontaneous speech (this study), to those on read speech (Bailey, 2016) indicate, somewhat surprisingly, that overall pitch is higher but Pitch Range narrower in the latter case.

The results of the perception task show that Maltese speakers are capable of identifying whether a masked stimulus is higher or lower than a baseline stimulus, but that they cannot identify masked stimuli as either Maltese or English on the basis of pitch information.