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Belching as a non-lexical speech object: Evidence from pop-culture

2018; Acoustical Society of America; Volume: 144; Issue: 3_Supplement Linguagem: Inglês

10.1121/1.5068366

1520-9024

Brooke L. Kidner,

Digital Communication and Language

Belching is normally considered an involuntary speech-tract vocalization. When speaking, involuntary speech-tract gestures such as belching often compete with speech for articulation by our vocal apparatus. There are non-lexical paralinguistic items (i.e., “ugh”) that also convey speech meaning, but traditionally belching is not regarded as a speech object. This study presents a case where belching appears to be an intentional speech act, occurring with clearly defined parameters and not in competition with speech. Data comes from the character Rick from TV’s Rick and Morty. Transcripts were collected and compared with the audio data. 105 belches were found in the 8 episodes investigated: all belches, except 1, were not written into the original scripts or transcriptions. Acoustic analysis showed no significant disruptions between belching and speech, supporting the conclusion that belches do not compete with speech. The most frequent occurrence of belching is word-medial, after the initial segment, which is a common infixation pattern cross-linguistically. Additional acoustic analysis showed belching occurred regularly before a stressed syllable, an established pattern for infixation in English. This pattern provides evidence that these belches are behaving phonologically as para-phonemic items. The results show that belching can be intentional and behave like paralinguistic items in human language and communication.