Posed stimuli dominate the study of nonverbal communication of emotion, but concerns have been raised that the use of posed stimuli may inflate recognition accuracy relative to spontaneous ...expressions. Here, we compare recognition of emotions from spontaneous expressions with that of matched posed stimuli. Participants made forced-choice judgments about the expressed emotion and whether the expression was spontaneous, and rated expressions on intensity (Experiments 1 and 2) and prototypicality (Experiment 2). Listeners were able to accurately infer emotions from both posed and spontaneous expressions, from auditory, visual, and audiovisual cues. Furthermore, perceived intensity and prototypicality were found to play a role in the accurate recognition of emotion, particularly from spontaneous expressions. Our findings demonstrate that perceivers can reliably recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions, and that depending on the comparison set, recognition levels can even be equivalent to that of posed stimulus sets.
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of ...their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.
Pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation share the assumption that listeners reason about alternative utterances that a speaker could have produced, but didn't. For such reasoning to be ...successful, listeners must have precise expectations about a speaker's production choices. This is at odds with the considerable variability across speakers that exists at all levels of linguistic representation. This tension can be reconciled by listeners adapting to the statistics of individual speakers. While linguistic adaptation is increasingly widely attested, semantic/pragmatic adaptation is underexplored. Moreover, what kind of representations listeners update during semantic/pragmatic adaptation – estimates of the speaker's lexicon, or estimates of the speaker's utterance preferences – remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate semantic/pragmatic adaptation in the domain of uncertainty expressions like might and probably. In a series of web-based experiments, we find 1) that listeners vary in their expectations about a generic speaker's use of uncertainty expressions; 2) that listeners rapidly update their expectations about the use of uncertainty expressions after brief exposure to a speaker with a specific usage of uncertainty expressions; and 3) that listeners' interpretations of uncertainty expressions change after being exposed to a specific speaker. We present a novel computational model of semantic/pragmatic adaptation based on Bayesian belief updating and show, through a series of model comparisons, that semantic/pragmatic adaptation is best captured by listeners updating their beliefs both about the speaker's lexicon and their utterance preferences. This work has implications for both semantic theories of uncertainty expressions and psycholinguistic theories of adaptation: it highlights the need for dynamic semantic representations and suggests that listeners integrate their general linguistic knowledge with speaker-specific experiences to arrive at more precise interpretations.
Three studies investigated how speakers' pitch affects listeners' attribution of mental capacity (e.g., the ability to feel emotions and physical sensations such as pain and pleasure; Gray et al., ...Science, 315, 2007, 619) to them and further explored downstream effects on social judgements. In Study 1 (N = 234), participants perceived more experience in higher‐(vs. lower‐)pitched speakers, whereas there was no significant difference in perception of agency to lower pitched or higher pitched speakers. In later studies, we expanded the relationship between male speakers' pitch and attributed experience in diverse contexts and observed that participants attributed more experience to higher pitched male victims, which was related to higher estimation of harm severity, leading to more negative judgement of the harmdoers (Study 2; N = 121) as well as recommendation for stronger treatment for the speakers (Study 3; N = 116). Our findings indicate that mind perception can vary as a function of targets' voice pitch, and in turn may influence people's judgements involving the speakers, as well as behavioural intentions towards them.
The revival of scholarly interest in political rhetoric is salutary, but has unnecessarily focused on defending only the kind of rhetoric whose end is to persuade listeners to change their judgments. ...In this article, I explore an additional style of rhetoric that has another aim: that of motivating or inspiriting listeners to support with vigorous action a judgment already made. Such rhetoric is not simply a species of persuasive rhetoric, and therefore must be justified on its own terms. I argue that motivational rhetoric is fundamentally linked to a particular psychological phenomenon: akrasia, or weakness of will. Through an examination of classical theorists of rhetoric, as well as contemporary debates and empirical research, I attempt to distinguish motivational rhetoric from its persuasive counterpart and make a preliminary defense for it as a legitimate mode of political speech.
Sound is caused by physical events in the world. Do humans infer these causes when recognizing sound sources? We tested whether the recognition of common environmental sounds depends on the inference ...of a basic physical variable – the source intensity (i.e., the power that produces a sound). A source's intensity can be inferred from the intensity it produces at the ear and its distance, which is normally conveyed by reverberation. Listeners could thus use intensity at the ear and reverberation to constrain recognition by inferring the underlying source intensity. Alternatively, listeners might separate these acoustic cues from their representation of a sound's identity in the interest of invariant recognition. We compared these two hypotheses by measuring recognition accuracy for sounds with typically low or high source intensity (e.g., pepper grinders vs. trucks) that were presented across a range of intensities at the ear or with reverberation cues to distance. The recognition of low-intensity sources (e.g., pepper grinders) was impaired by high presentation intensities or reverberation that conveyed distance, either of which imply high source intensity. Neither effect occurred for high-intensity sources. The results suggest that listeners implicitly use the intensity at the ear along with distance cues to infer a source's power and constrain its identity. The recognition of real-world sounds thus appears to depend upon the inference of their physical generative parameters, even generative parameters whose cues might otherwise be separated from the representation of a sound's identity.
This research aimed at investigating the extent of accentedness and intelligibility as well as the acceptability of Indonesian foreign-accented speech perceived by native and non-native listeners, as ...well as finding their correlation to each other. It used qualitative research. The participant of the research was selected using purposive sampling. The participants were divided into speakers and listeners. There are six speakers and four listeners selected. The four listeners were native and nonnative listeners who rated and transcribed six recorded reading of Indonesian speakers by means of SPIN (Speech Perception in Noise) test. The results show that native listeners rate the speech almost the same way as non-native listeners do. The speeches with clear and accurate pronunciation are rated highly accepted and fully intelligible, regardless of having a very strong accent. In contrast, less clear and accurate pronunciations, as well as a very strong accent of the speeches, are rated unacceptable and still reasonably intelligible. The result of the correlation test between accentedness and intelligibility as well as accentedness and acceptability of the accent finds on no account of correlation to each other. Therefore, accentedness and intelligibility plus accentedness and acceptability of the accent are independent, so that strong foreign accent could stay acceptable and intelligible. The factors found to influence the judgment are the familiarity of the accent, clarity, and accuracy of pronunciation. Aforementioned findings have implication to challenge English teachers in Indonesia to develop meaningful activities to teach English pronunciation accurately to be regarded as fully intelligible and acceptable by listeners, especially native English listeners.
This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of the US-Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to border ...architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and additional valences of violence enacted through border landscapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the border's imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecology of critical border studies becomes more proximate, material, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts its sensory affects - the border as experience.
The effect of non-speech sounds, such as breathing noise, on the perception of speech timing is currently unclear. In this paper we report the results of three studies investigating participants' ...ability to detect a silent gap located adjacent to breath sounds during naturalistic speech. Experiment 1 (n = 24, in-person) asked whether participants could either detect or locate a silent gap that was added adjacent to breath sounds during speech. In Experiment 2 (n = 182; online), we investigated whether different placements within an utterance were more likely to elicit successful detection of gaps. In Experiment 3 (n = 102; online), we manipulated the breath sounds themselves to examine the effect of breath-specific characteristics on gap identification. Across the study, we document consistent effects of gap duration, as well as gap placement. Moreover, in Experiment 2, whether a gap was positioned before or after an interjected breath significantly predicted accuracy as well as the duration threshold at which gaps were detected, suggesting that nonverbal aspects of audible speech production specifically shape listeners' temporal expectations. We also describe the influences of the breath sounds themselves, as well as the surrounding speech context, that can disrupt objective gap detection performance. We conclude by contextualising our findings within the literature, arguing that the verbal acoustic signal is not “speech itself” per se, but rather one part of an integrated percept that includes speech-related respiration, which could be more fully explored in speech perception studies.
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies ...cross-linguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners' reference resolution, as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Collaborative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners' real-time incremental processing and reference identification. We apply the ICE framework to physical reference, showing that listeners construct expressions designed to minimize listeners' expected visual search effort during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers' propensity to over-specify. Moreover, the ICE model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that physical reference production is best understood as driven by a collaborative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length.
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