Monica, Monica. America has fretted, dieted and shopped with this girl. We're saturated with visions of her beret, her perfect teeth, her cascade of hair. And we've heard all the intimate details of her inappropriate relationship.

We've heard it all.

Actually, we haven't.

We -- many of us, anyway -- have not yet heard Monica's voice. Not so much as a "No comment." And how can we possibly know her without hearing her?

When we finally hear it, will Monica's voice have the girlish, uptalk rhythms and flavors we associate with pampered Beverly Hills twentysomethings? Will her words steam with the breathy wistfulness of Marilyn? Will she evoke the nasal whininess of a Fran Drescher?

Sometime soon -- in a few weeks or maybe longer, officials say -- the House Judiciary Committee is expected to release edited copies of the tapes Linda Tripp made of her conversations with Lewinsky. Will her voice reveal something we don't know? A sense of irony? World-weary wisdom? Sincere bewilderment? Will it change what we think of her?

Rightly or wrongly, linguists say we form opinions about people more by how they speak than by what they say. We measure them by their voice: a British accent, a Southern drawl.

The tapes probably will confirm widely held stereotypes about female voices -- and young voices -- in a country where studies have shown that both men and women prefer listening to male voices. Then we'll make more judgments about Lewinskyfrom how fast she talks and from her tone: Sympathetic? Sarcastic? Enthusiastic? Desperate?

"Sometimes if you have a preconceived notion of a particular person, you'll find [in the voice] what you are looking for," says Colleen Cotter, an assistant professor in the linguistics department at Georgetown University.

Already, from the released Tripp transcripts, linguists are drawing conclusions based upon how the former intern uses language.

"What struck me in reading is that a very young person is talking," says JoAnne Brown, a historian of political language and assistant dean for undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. "The speech mannerisms were the speech mannerisms of a teen-ager and not of a professional political assistant. It only confirmed what I've heard said elsewhere: 'This is the youngest 23-year-old I've met.' The language was very unformed.

"What was difficult to discover from reading the transcript was if a lot of those hesitancies ... are from a lack of rhetorical skill or from concealment."

To academics a voice is not simply a voice. It's a subcontinent of personality with such territories as tone, emphasis, pacing, cadence and pitch.

Various vocal components create impressions of a person's confidence, in himself and in what he's saying. A rapid, uneven pace, for instance, can often indicate a person is uncertain, while a slower, evenly paced voice is associated with maturity, says Philip Backlund, professor of communications at Central Washington University in Washington.

The degree of Lewinsky's self-assuredness on the Tripp tapes could affect her image as victim or predator.

Cultural stereotypes also carry over to pitch. Traditionally, male voices were used in advertising to impart authority and persuade consumers; women's voices belonged to the historically inferior sex.

"We have assumed a lot of confidence in lower-pitched voices," says Backlund, "which is why most women on national news have a lower-pitched voice."

Cotter, the Georgetown linguist, notes that when women started becoming radio announcers in the 1920s, there was great

debate about whether women's voices were fit for public discourse. Today, women in corporate leadership positions have calculate their manner of speaking to indicate power -- for example, slow their pace and eliminate emotion-laden words.

"If we were evaluating a male White House intern the same age as Monica, from the same geographical area, with the same markers of youth in his speech, we probably would not judge him as negatively," Cotter says. "[Such comparisons] might show how we could be stacking the deck [against female voices]."

Dr. Judith Tingley, a psychologist in Phoenix who studies gender communications, also has noticed the negative perception of women's voices. She recently asked a group of men what they would most wish to change about women, and was surprised to hear them say they wished women's voices were less shrill and high-pitched. She says they may be reacting to an emotional intensity that women are apt to express.

"As a woman's voice is perceived as becoming more intense, it makes men uncomfortable and they back out either physically or mentally to avoid the discomfort."

Psychiatrist Walter Weintraub, a professor at the University of Maryland Medical School who has written two books on verbal behavior, says women are more apt to make value judgments -- "This is good," "I do not approve" -- and to speak with more explanations and rationalizations. Using such "explainers" as "because" and "therefore," he says, lends an apologetic quality to speech.

Women are also fond of "adverbial intensifiers," Weintraub says.

"Those are adverbs that raise the temperature of the sentence such as 'He's such a nice person' or 'That's tremendously useful.' Until adolescence, boys and girls use them about the same, but then girls begin to blossom in this area. ... [These words] give a lot of color and warmth to women's speech."

Women commonly use speech retractors: saying something and then moving back from it.

"It's 'Oh, I'm crazy about this person, but he does have certain shortcomings' or 'I think you're a wonderful person, however, you have to watch the way you buy your shoes.' It imparts a certain fickleness to their speech, but also an openness, an ability to consider different aspects of a question," he says.

In the current climate of television advertising, those speech quirks may actually prove an advantage. There's a trend to move away from "announcery" male voices to "real people" voices, says Jodi Kipperman of Kipperman Casting in New York.

However, men are still getting almost 75 percent of the work, according to Vivian Farrar Hernon, chair of the women's voice-over committee of the New York Screen Actors Guild. In 1986, a study commissioned by SAG found that consumers indicated no preference between identical ads using male and female voices. At that time, 10 percent of the voice-overs went to women. Now, women get 27 percent of the work but less than 20 percent of overall voice-over earnings, she says.

Whether you're male or female, you can hire a voice coach to minimize speech, pitch or pacing problems. Many executives and political figures hire coaches to help prepare themselves to testify for, say, a day in court or Congress.

In preparatory sessions, these coaches emphasize pacing above all, Backlund says. Speakers are admonished to speak slowly, be straightforward, and keep the pace, so they will not come across as being immature.

"It sounds more measured and thus more credible," he says.

The Tripp tapes, when they are released, will only present Lewinsky venting to her girlfriend and talking about sex. Others who have heard her in different settings and situations -- her Washington hairdresser, one of her former criminal lawyers, for example -- refuse to characterize her voice.

Backlund, who said he heard Monica say something like "give me some space" on the news as she ducked past TV cameras at the courthouse, described her voice as higher pitched and uneven in tone, "all of which indicates she's not exactly totally comfortable and in control of her self."

Who would feel comfortable with microphones thrust in their face?

Despite the power the voice commands, Cotter cautions people to not read too much into it and its stereotypes. "The information a voice gives others is not like information in a genetic code," she observes. "It can't tell the listener anything really essential."

Pub Date: 10/14/98