ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

Communicating Dominance through Prosody in Deaf Speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan

This study investigates politeness prosody strategies among Taiwanese deaf adults, aiming to fill a gap in research that has traditionally focused on deaf children. Additionally, it explores whether sociolinguistic prosody varies between individuals who have entered the workforce and those who have not, using workforce entry as a proxy for social age. The research involves a role-playing task where participants enact various scenarios, emphasizing speech acts associated with requests and orders. The study finds that adult deaf speakers do not utilize frequency or temporal cues to convey politeness prosodies, and this utilization is not correlated with the social age operationalized in the study.