Prosodic performance & the Queen’s speech

The study in a sentence

Previous research has shown a substantial degree of change in segmental (vowels and consonants) aspects of Queen Elizabeth II's speech over the course of her life.

This study shows that, in contrast to these well documented changes, prosodic features of the late Queen’s broadcast speeches changed very little over 70 years.

The question

This study explores whether there is variation across the lifespan in key prosodic features of Queen Elizabeth II’s speech.

The hypothesis is that there would not be major changes in use of pitch and in speaking tempo in the late Queen's speech over time.

Why? In part due to the restricted genre of a scripted public speech but also in part due to the late Queen's own individual performance style, developed in early life.

Key concepts

Prosodic features of speech span stretches of talk longer than a single vowel or consonant – and take in a range of things, including word stress, sentence stress, rhythm, intonation and voice quality.

Lifespan studies allow linguists to track change over time within the speech of a single person.

This analysis conducted for this study was originally prepared for the BBC Radio 4 programme “The Queen’s English”.

You can listen to the full programme HERE.

Methods

The study used speech samples from five different public broadcasts given by Queen Elizabeth II between 1947-2017. Acoustic phonetic analysis was used to measure the maximum pitch and speaking rate in each phrase from each speech. These measurements were then compared across the different speeches to see whether there had been any change over time.

The answer

The late Queen demonstrates a highly stable prosodic performance style over a 70-year period. The study found changes in line with expectations for how voices change with age, but no change in how pitch was used to mark discourse structure.

Speaking tempo also remained consistent over time.

An explanation for this lack of change is the maintenance of consistent cues to discourse structure, within a restricted discourse genre (scripted public speeches).

Classroom activities

Lead in task

How prosody and punctuation can change text meanings

Extension task

To what extent can you 'predict' discourse structure, in different genres of text and speech?

In more detail

Workshop talk (video)

CPD2024_royal_prosody_workshop_talk_slides.pdf

Workshop talk (slides)

Meet the author

Sam Hellmuth is a Professor of Linguistics. She conducts research in suprasegmental phonology, with particular focus on spoken Arabic dialects.

Read the paper

Hellmuth, S. (2024). Stability of prosodic performance over the lifespan: The (late) Queen’s speech. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024, Leiden, NL. [DOWNLOAD HERE]

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