The prosody of cheering in sports events: the case of long-distance running.

Since cheering has not yet been systematically investigated from a phonetic perspective, this study explores its acoustic characteristics by focusing on a specific type of cheering: inciting calls directed at individual runners during long-distance races, using their names. We investigate its prosodic realization through an experimental approach. We present findings from a production study with recordings in the lab comparing cheering utterances to neutral speech. 30 native speakers of German were asked to cheer on an individual marathon runner in a sporting event shown in a video by calling out his or her name (1-5 syllables). For reasons of comparison, the participants also produced the same names in isolation and carrier sentences. Our results reveal four different cheering patterns: (i) separately produced items of similar duration, (ii) division of items into syllables, (iii) mixed pattern of (i) and (ii), and finally (iv) a singing pattern, again mixed with (i) and (ii). When cheering for the marathon runners, participants used a higher fundamental frequency, a wider F0 range, longer item duration, slower speech rates, and increased intensity.