Features of the final intonation of a female voice actor’s speech in women’s and men’s roles

Abstract

Some female voice actors play boys’ and men’s roles in Japan anime. I conducted two experiments investigating in what respect their speech differs in men’s and women’s roles.

In the first experiment, I observed a female voice actor’s speech in men’s and women’s roles. Since her speech has already been analyzed regarding F0 features and vowel formants, I deal with features of final intonation in this research note.

In the other experiment, 22 Japanese native speakers listened to her speech and judged the personality of the roles, because research has shown that intonation affects the image of the personality of the speakers.

The results were as follows:

(1) In women’s roles, the actor often used rising intonation even the utterances were not question sentences.

(2) In men’s roles, she used different intonation types depending on the personality of the role.

(3) She often used rise-fall intonation on open and less conscientious roles regardless of the gender of the roles.