Tempo-rhythmic characteristics of spontaneous speech of speakers of certain types of mental accentuations of personality in states of psychoemotional tension

Zhabin Dmitrii Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0001-5528-2699 PhD in Philology Associate Professor of the German Philology Department, Voronezh State University 394018, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, pl. Lenin str., 10, office 26a dmitry.zhabin@mail.ru

The subject of our psycholinguistic research is the formal signs of spontaneous sounding speech of a speaker in a stressful situation. We assume that indicators of emotional tension of speech in perception are, first of all, formal means of sounding speech at the level of rhythm, tempo, speech failures, which are in relation to complementarity with the semantic content of the phrase and signal the degree of tension of speech. Thus, the state of emotional tension is transmitted by a complex of formal signs of sounding speech.

In the course of the study, we attempted to identify and describe changes in the formal signs of a speaker's speech in a state of emotional tension. The experimental study of spontaneous speech was determined by the psycholinguistic nature of the phenomenon under study. The description of changes in the formal features of sounding speech makes it possible to obtain objective results with linguistic meaning based on the method of auditory analysis.

The definition of the term "stress" contains at its core the component "stress" (from the English Stress – pressure, tension) and serves to denote human conditions that arise in response to a variety of extreme environmental influences (stressors) ^[1,2]. There are physiological stress factors (physical exertion, high / low temperatures, painful stimuli, increased heart rate, etc.); and psychological (factors acting with their signal value: threat, danger, joy, resentment, grief, information overload, etc.). Psychological stressors are usually understood as informational (a person does not cope with a task, does not have time to make the right decisions at the required pace with a high degree of responsibility for the consequences of decisions made) and emotional (changes in the course of mental processes, disorders of motor and speech behavior). The presence of one or another stressor or their combination causes a type of stress and, one way or another, causes emotional tension, which manifests itself in the speaker's speech ^{[3, p. 39; 4,5,6]}.

As an example of a psychological stress factor, we considered court hearings in criminal cases on 17 episodes. Audio recordings made during the judicial investigations of spontaneous sounding speech of native speakers of the Russian language in a situation that causes the stress state of the speaker presented the object of our experiment. The total playing time was 245 minutes. spontaneous speech of the accused and victims, namely, 14 interrogations of the accused (among them 9 men, 5 women) from 16 to 37 years old; 16 interrogations of victims (among them 10 men, 6 women) from 18 to 65 years old. The psychiatrists we engaged analyzed the mental status of each subject and determined the type of mental accentuation of the personality of the subjects within the framework of K. Leonhard's classification. K. Leonhard's accentuation of personality is understood as the maximum expression of individual character traits and their compatibility, which represent extreme variants of the mental norm, the so-called dominant personality ^[7].

It is worth noting that the choice of personality typing according to mental accentuation was not made by chance. Thus, we attempt to analyze certain speech characteristics of the speaker, expanding the field of psycholinguistic analysis of the "portrait of the speaker's personality" in particular and linguistic criminalistic expertise in general. Thus, the type of temperament characterizes an individual in terms of dynamic factors of mental activity, the intensity of mental processes that are caused by hereditary neurophysiological factors. In turn, the type of mental response is based on the characteristics of a person's character. In other words, the type of accentuation can choose one or another response model. In addition to neurophysiological data, a person's reaction is influenced by the peculiarities of upbringing, family traditions, worldview, and social position. That is why we find it most interesting to analyze a broader personality – intellectual capabilities, systems of views, assessments and imaginative representations of the world, a person's attitude to the surrounding reality and himself, as well as the basic life positions conditioned by these views (beliefs, ideals, principles of cognition and activity, value orientations). In other words, the method of determining the accentuation of personality makes a reliable analysis not only of the characteristics of character (the so-called psychological phenotype of personality), but also of his temperament (the psychological basis of personality).   

Linguistic analysis allows us to assess with a certain degree of reliability the emotional state of the speaker (deviation from the norm, anxiety, tension, presence and type of emotions, for example, excitement, surprise, fear, etc.), psychophysiological state (abnormality, presence of pathology) ^{[8, 9, 10]}, finally, to establish boundary criteria for determining stress disorder for a particular mental type.

As a result of the observation, we identified 6 types of personality accentuation among the presented subjects: with a pedantic personality type – 6, with an emotive personality type – 5, with an introverted personality type – 5, with demonstrative character traits – 5, with a dysthymic type – 5, with excitable accentuation – 4.  

The sounding texts obtained as a result of the first stage of the experiment were recorded on CD-ROMs, transcribed and provided to free auditors (30 people, non-specialists in the field of linguistics, psycholinguistics) for subsequent analysis. The auditors listened to the audio texts on the disc; identified the parts of the text that, in their opinion, indicate a clear change in the speaker's state, indicating the tension with a "+" sign (depending on the increasing degree "+ +", "+ + +") and the absence of tension is marked with a "0".

At the next stage, phonetists highlighted pauses and stressed syllables on the entire array of sounding material. Thus, the volume of material in rhythmic groups was determined – 3450 RG (hereinafter referred to as the RG – the number of rhythmic syllables from pause to pause and the position of the stressed syllables in it).

The length of the text is 245 minutes. it amounted to 48020 syllables.

According to O.S. Akhmanova, speech tempo means the speed of speech flow over time. The tempo can be fast, slow and intermittent ^{[11, p. 472]}. Slowing down the tempo towards the end of an utterance serves as a means of creating its intonational integrity. The pace of speech plays an important role in contrasting the important / unimportant in an utterance: the most important segments of speech (whole syntagmas or individual words in them) are pronounced in slow motion; fragments containing secondary information (for example, introductory words) are characterized by a faster pace. The absolute pace of speech depends on the individual characteristics of the speaker, his emotional state, communication situation and pronunciation style ^{[11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]}. In our experiment, the tempo of speech was measured by dividing the total number of syllables in a replica by the time it sounded for each subject. An increase or decrease in the number of syllables per minute in one or another part of the text was compared with the marking of this part by the auditors. So, within the framework of each type of mental accentuation of personality, we observed a clear change in the average tempo parameters. Almost the entire array of speech material shows an increase in tempo with an increase in the degree of intensity of speech. For example, in subjects with demonstrative character traits, the syllable/min in "0" = 144; "+" = 250; "++" = 270; "+++" = 310; in subjects with pedantic accentuation in "0" = 160; "+" = 180; "++" = 200; "+++" = 200; subjects with an emotive personality type in "0" = 206; "+" = 275; "++" = 306; an especially pronounced increase in the number of syllables is observed in a subject with excitable accentuation – in "0" = 168; "+" = 250; "++" = 280; "+++" = 370.

The opposite data were obtained in the analysis of speech in subjects with an introverted type of accentuation: "0" = 177; "+" = 280; "++" = 210; "+++" = 180. This proves that the state of emotional tension decompensates the isolation characteristic of this mental type: they find it difficult to establish emotional contacts; they are laconic; speech is limited to a set of standard expressions, the voice is little modulated, manual skills are poorly developed.

An important component of spontaneous speech is rhythm. In our opinion, the most detailed definition of rhythm is offered by the Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary, edited by V.N. Yartseva: "Rhythm is a regular repetition of similar and commensurate speech units that performs structuring, text–forming and expressive-emotional functions" ^{[17, p. 416]}.

Speech rhythm is of interest from the point of view of defining units both at the universal level and for individual languages. The lack of a unified methodology for the study of sounding speech poses the problem of describing the phenomenon of speech rhythm. We believe that the study of spontaneous sounding speech gives an idea of the periodic recurrence of certain rhythmic structures, and their nature depends on the type of syntactic structures and the genre of utterance. The set of units at the rhythm level is defined. At the same time, each unit is implemented by a number of syntactic units, larger or smaller, depending on the frequency of this rhythmic unit ^{[18, p. 40]}. In the process of sounding speech, the stressed syllable is combined with the preceding and/or subsequent unstressed syllables into a so-called rhythmic group. The latter, in turn, represents a complete statement or part of it. In the free flow of speech, rhythmic groups are separated from each other by pauses and/or melodic signs ^{[19, p. 107]}. The psycholinguistic nature of this phenomenon is of particular interest to us, since the definition of rhythmic groups occurs in a perceptual way.

          During our experiment, we examined the typical configurations of rhythmic groups in the spontaneous speech of the subjects in sections of texts with varying degrees of emotional tension. At the same time, we were guided by the criteria reflected in the following table, which demonstrates the change in frequency frequencies and their number with increasing degree of emotional intensity of speech according to the formula:

X : Y = Z,

where X denotes the length of the RG in syllables, Y is the place of the stressed syllable in this RG,

Z is the frequency of occurrence of this WG in the part of the text with the indicated degree of tension marking

As can be seen from the table, we actually did not receive information about the frequency bands in the sections of the text marked with the maximum degree of tension. This indicates the instability of the rhythmic characteristics of the speaker's speech in a state of greatest emotional tension. Most of the frequency responses are observed in sections of the text with an average degree of emotional tension. At the same time, the stressed syllable most often occupies the last position in the RG. If we consider the position of the stressed syllable on the entire array of speech material, then there is a certain pattern in the speech of the speakers, regarding their belonging to a certain type of mental accentuation. Thus, for pedants, with an increase in the degree of emotional tension, the position of the stressed syllable moves from the final to the central one. The same tendency can be traced in demonstrative and excitable personalities (from the final position to the initial one). In introverts and emotives, we observed the opposite pattern – from the central position, the stressed syllable moves to the final one. Finally, we have established an interesting fact of the position of the stressed syllable in speakers with a dysthymic personality type: with an increase in the degree of emotional tension, the position of the stressed syllable remains stable – on the penultimate syllable in the RG.

We observed speech failures (reservations) throughout the entire array of material, their frequency was compared with the labeling of one or another part of the text in accordance with the degree of speech intensity. It should be noted that by speech failures we mean cases when, instead of one necessary word, another, erroneous one appears in the text. Such errors indicate a weakening of the speaker's control over speech-thinking processes. These are natural and natural costs of the speech mechanism ^{[20, p. 37]}, in other cases, the wrong word is a pause or a noticeable decrease in tone on the correct word. In our study, we observed repeats, false repeats, false starts. At the same time, we use the term "false repetition" to distinguish the repetition of a whole word or phrase (repetition) from the repetition of a part of a word or phrase in a sounding speech without subsequent autocorrection (self-correction).

We noted the largest number of false starts, repetitions and false repeats in parts of the text with an average degree of tension for all identified groups; the lowest indicators are typical for parts of the text with both maximum tension and its complete absence. 

Thus, the conducted experiment allows us to identify some typical tempo-rhythmic signs of speech of speakers belonging to various types of mental accentuation. Psycholinguistic research indicates the presence of rhythmic indicators of the intensity of spontaneous sounding speech, which in turn can be used to characterize the mental status of the speaker in conditions of emotional tension.