What makes Kirara sound different from Lyney? Gender differences in off-stage conversation and mediatized speech in Japanese

Abstract

This study examines gender differences in Japanese speech in two contexts: an ‘off-stage’ conversational context (radio programs) and a mediatized performative context (performances in video games and animations such as Genshin Impact and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure ). Speech from the same speakers was analysed for various features expected to characterize women’s speech: mean f0 (i.e. pitch), f0 range, final syllable duration, boundary pitch movement (BPM), and the use of gendered sentence final particles (e.g. wa and ze ). Results showed minimal gender differences in the conversational context (only mean f0), but a significant effect of context for women, with higher f0s, increased use of rising f0 contours, and more feminine sentence final particles in their character performances as compared to their interviews. In contrast, men showed no phonetic differences between contexts, only increasing the use of masculine sentence final particles. These results are consistent with previous proposals that women’s mediatized speech is unique, differing from women’s everyday ‘off-stage’ speech in ways that cannot be attributed to more general mediatized performative speech enhancements. The findings suggest that a unique combination of phonetic, phonological, and morphological cues are used for female characters in Japanese mediatized speech.