I was offered to turn my BA thesis into a publishable article. Check out the abstract.
September 2023
For my Bachelor's thesis in English Language and Literature, I examined how listeners form social judgements about speakers based on perceived pitch and facial attractiveness. The study focused on multimodal podcasts as its setting. My supervisor, PROF. DAVID BRITAIN, encouraged me to develop the findings into a journal article. The draft is complete and we are preparing it for submission. For now, only the abstract is available below.
This study examines how fundamental frequency (f0) and facial attractiveness jointly influence social perception of a male speaker, drawing on sociolinguistic theories of indexicality and the warmth–competence framework. A between-subjects matched-guise experiment was conducted in which 129 participants each evaluated one of six guises of a single male speaker that varied in pitch (low vs. high f0) and facial appearance (more vs. less attractive), including two audio-only conditions. Participants rated the speaker on 16 attributes grouped into four perceptual dimensions: Attractiveness, Appeal, Solidarity, and Status.
Planned contrasts revealed that both f0 and facial attractiveness significantly influenced evaluations, but their relative importance varied by dimension. Fundamental frequency exerted larger effects on Attractiveness, Appeal, and Status (Cohen's d = 1.21–1.72), whilst facial attractiveness had a larger effect on Solidarity (d = 1.15 vs. 0.79 for f0). Participant gender substantially moderated these effects, with male listeners showing stronger sensitivity to f0 than female listeners.
These findings suggest that vocal and facial characteristics function as indexical signs that jointly constitute a speaker's social style, with f0 particularly diagnostic for competence-related inferences and facial attractiveness for warmth-related inferences.
Keywords: sociolinguistic perception, fundamental frequency, facial attractiveness, matched-guise, indexicality, warmth–competence.