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Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 333] 2023
► pp. 213–249

Chapter 8
Perceptual changes between adults and children for multimodal im/politeness in Japanese

ORCID logo | CLLE UMR5263 CNRS, Pessac, France | LaBRI UMR5800 CNRS, Talence, France
ORCID logo | Université Paris Saclay, CNRS, LISN | Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
ORCID logo | Haskins Laboratories

Japanese im/politeness attitudes are conveyed by audiovisual prosody in tandem with lexical markers. This chapter reports on two experiments about the acquisition by Japanese elementary school children of prosodic codes and social categories. The first experiment studied the perceived degree of politeness and its social use, and the second, the perceived similarity between the expressivities conveyed in pairs of expressions. An analysis of the audiovisual performances showed the types of changes in pitch and range in line with symbolic frequency and effort codes. The perceptual results showed that children learn to use and recognize im/polite expressions in a socially adequate fashion between 6 to 10 years old, thus showing an underlying growing cultural coherence gained with age.

Keywords: perceptual changes, multimodal expressivity, im/politeness, Japanese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Listeners
    • 2.2Stimuli
    • 2.3Acoustic and facial analysis
      • 2.3.1Acoustic and facial measurements
      • 2.3.2Acoustic parameters variation
      • 2.3.3Action Units
      • 2.3.4Head movements
      • 2.3.5Gaze direction
    • 2.4Experimental paradigm
      • 2.4.1Experiment 1
      • 2.4.2Experiment 2
    • 2.5Statistical processing
      • 2.5.1Experiment 1
      • 2.5.2Experiment 2
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Experiment 1
      • 3.1.1Question 1
      • 3.1.2Question 2
    • 3.2Experiment 2
      • 3.2.1Spread of stimuli across the perceptual space
      • 3.2.2Shape of the perceptual space
      • 3.2.3Proportion of shared knowledge
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.08sho
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