The Prosody of Cheering in Sport Events

Motivational speaking usually conveys a highly emotional message and its purpose is to invite action. The goal of this paper is to investigate the prosodic realization of one particular type of cheering, namely inciting cheering for single addressees in sport events (here, long-distance running), using the name of that person. 31 native speakers of German took part in the experiment. They were asked to cheer up an individual marathon runner in a sporting event represented by video by producing his or her name (1-5 syllables long). For reasons of comparison, the participants also produced the same names in isolation and carrier sentences. Our results reveal that speakers use different strategies to meet their motivational communicative goals: while some speakers produced the runners’ names by dividing them into syllables, others pronounced the names as quickly as possible putting more emphasis on the first syllable. A few speakers followed a mixed strategy. Contrary to our expectations, it was not the intensity that mostly contributes to the differences between the different speaking styles (cheering vs. neutral), at least in the methods we were using. Rather, participants employed higher fundamental frequency and longer duration when cheering for marathon runners.