VOICE-OVERS IN STANDARDIZED ENGLISH AND SPANISH TELEVISION COMMERCIALS

Our aim in this article is to explore the paralinguistic characteristics of voices in voice-overs in a corpus of English and Spanish TV ads. Our underlying premise is that voice-overs, just like linguistic messages, images and music, convey information which is picked up by viewers whether at a conscious or subconscious level. In our analysis we attempt to find what patterns, if any, can be discovered in our corpus of voice-overs with regard to a number of parameters such as gender, accent, age and voice-quality. To this end we gathered data on our corpus of voice-overs through questionnaires completed by native English and Spanish informants respectively. The analysis we have carried out goes beyond previous research into voice-overs which either centres on one of the above parameters in isolation or which makes use of the intuitions of researchers using limited samples of TV ads. Our findings reveal that prestigious accents predominate in both the English and Spanish voice-overs. We also discovered that female voices are perceived to be younger than those of their male counterparts and voice characteristics such as pitch, breathiness, assertiveness and others also seem to correlate with the gender of the speaker.