My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
-
Nicole Holliday
Abstract
Collecting code-switching data has long been a challenge for sociolinguists, because eliciting naturalistic alternations between one language or variety and another is often pragmatically difficult. Data for the current study comes from a social media thread dedicated to “code-switching”, representing a new way of using online recordings for analysis of sociolinguistic phenomena. In October 2019, a Twitter user posted a Memoji avatar video, soliciting responses that illustrate how individuals “code-switch” between “regular” and “work” voices. Responding users’ decisions about the design of their Memoji images provide sociolinguistic information frequently absent from online data; namely the user’s performance of race, gender, and style. Analysis focuses on prosodic differences between the “regular” and “work” styles for 142 user responses to the original post. Regression models reveal differences between users’ “home voices” and “work voices”; these include different pitch range settings by context, more monotone realizations in the work voices, and rise-fall and fall-rise patterns that differ between contexts. These results provide important information about how the same individuals may employ intraspeaker prosodic differences to construct racialized professional and personal identities. Additionally, they represent a new point of departure for studying the phonetic correlates of racialized style-shifting.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editor, Dan Duncan as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper also benefited from earlier feedback from Byron Ahn, Paul Reed, Rachel Steindel Burdin, and the audience of the Linguistic Society of America’s 2021 Annual Meeting. Finally, I would like to thank Emelia Benson Meyer for tirelessly downloading and labeling Memoji files, and for assistance with coding.
Appendix A: Bayesian regression model for ranges ∼ voice × gender, with speaker as a random effect
| Estimate | Estimated error | L-95 % CI | U-95 % CI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 83.86 | 3.63 | 76.68 | 90.90 |
| Work voice | 45.52 | 3.71 | 38.22 | 52.80 |
| Gender:male | −34.81 | 6.92 | −48.37 | −21.14 |
| Work voice × gender:male | −8.65 | 6.68 | −21.82 | 4.49 |
Appendix B: Bayesian regression model for Prominences ∼ voice × gender, with speaker as a random effect
| Estimate | Estimated error | L-95 % CI | U-95 % CI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 4.15 | 0.03 | 4.08 | 4.21 |
| Work voice | 0.03 | 0.05 | −0/06 | 0.12 |
| Gender:male | 0.01 | 0.06 | −0.10 | 0.12 |
| Work voice × gender:male | 0.01 | 0.08 | −0.15 | 0.15 |
Appendix C: Chi-square tests for level differences by voice and gender
| Gender | Voice | Last | chi2 | df | p-Value | lbl | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| X-squared | F | H | 1 | 72.9753 | 4 | 0 | 1-5 |
| X-squared1 | F | W | 1 | 104.1877 | 4 | 0 | 1-5 |
| X-squared2 | M | H | 1 | 18.1795 | 4 | 0.0011 | 1-5 |
| X-squared3 | M | W | 1 | 46.9084 | 4 | 0 | 1-5 |
| X-squared4 | F | H | 2 | 91.1332 | 4 | 0 | 2-5 |
| X-squared5 | F | W | 2 | 152.752 | 4 | 0 | 2-5 |
| X-squared6 | M | H | 2 | 16.3083 | 4 | 0.0026 | 2-5 |
| X-squared7 | M | W | 2 | 61.04 | 4 | 0 | 2-5 |
| X-squared8 | F | H | 3 | 88.0467 | 4 | 0 | 3-5 |
| X-squared9 | F | W | 3 | 74.8788 | 4 | 0 | 3-5 |
| X-squared10 | M | H | 3 | 15.7549 | 4 | 0.0034 | 3-5 |
| X-squared11 | M | W | 3 | 5.4775 | 4 | 0.2417 | 3-5 |
| X-squared12 | F | H | 4 | 6.4375 | 4 | 0.1688 | 4-5 |
| X-squared13 | F | W | 4 | 8.1147 | 4 | 0.0875 | 4-5 |
| X-squared14 | M | H | 4 | 43.4786 | 4 | 0 | 4-5 |
| X-squared15 | M | W | 4 | 9.3191 | 4 | 0.0536 | 4-5 |
| X-squared16 | F | H | 5 | 18.7907 | 4 | 0.0009 | 5-5 |
| X-squared17 | F | W | 5 | 36.5427 | 4 | 0 | 5-5 |
| X-squared18 | M | H | 5 | 12.19 | 4 | 0.016 | 5-5 |
| X-squared19 | M | W | 5 | 11.5904 | 4 | 0.0207 | 5-5 |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
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- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
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- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
