Number 1
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Objective: To assess whether voice pitch is a reliable signal of leadership ability, if individuals with lower pitched voices are better leaders, individuals with lower pitched voices should be more persuasive when making policy appeals. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Study 1. Observational study. Recordings of each Member of Congress. Voice sources from YouTube and CSPAN online archive videos. |
Study1. Leadership ability is measured based on a power ranking of the Members of the 109th US Congress created by Knowlegis (cqrollcall.com/knowlegis) and compared to results of acoustic analysis by PRAAT used to measure the mean F0 of each recording. |
Study 1. 536 Members of Congress |
Study 2. Policy persuasion experiment. Four male and four female native English speakers were recorded speaking the following six policy advocacy statements: |
Study 2. The experiment required subjects to listen to recordings of policy advocacy statements delivered by speakers with differently pitched voices to test whether speakers with lower voices are more persuasive. |
Study 2. 777 participants. 344 men and 433 women. Cooperative; Congressional. |
“You should support same sex marriage” |
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Number 2
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Objective: Study the “prosodic variation as a cue to pragmatic interpretation in a specific linguistic construction namely [l+verb]”. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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An online language questionnaire adapted from the questionnaire Zaho’s (2013) was used and online perception tasks created via Qualtrics (Qualtrics Lab, INC, 2015) and validated by pilot test. The tasks combine the studies of Meyer and Mleineks (2006) that use electronic research to present audio recordings for the perception and categorization of tasks involving the prosodic interpretation of issues/utterances in Russian; and the studies of Kurumada et al. (2012) with electronic human intelligence (artificial intelligence) in tasks of weekly interpretations and prosodic variation of the utterance: “It looks like”, and that similarly, analyzed the effect of prosodic variation in the semantic interpretation. |
‘‘Think’’ (‘juede’ in Mandarin), the most used belief verb, was used across trials. All target nouns were imaginable, common words and were chosen for their neutrality and contextual plausibility. (...) These were audio recorded with one of the six prosodic variations and presented for the listener to click and hear. Each recording was followed by a question asking the participant to choose whether the speaker in the recording sounds, ‘‘Deliberate,’’ ‘‘Uncertain,’’ or ‘‘Reluctant’’, with a short definition following each term” (...) “This task included 24 target nouns with each of the six prosodic variations appearing four times”. |
59 individuals consisting of 30 in the US/English group and 29 in the China/Mandarin Group. |
Number 3
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Objective: To shed light on how speakers and listeners use systematic variations in verbal and vocal cues to communicate confidence along a continuum of expressed meanings (confident, close-to-confident, unconfident) and in the context of utterances serving different communicative functions (facts, judgments, intentions). |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Experiment 1. Sentences were produced by native Canadian English speakers. Speakers were encouraged to produce statements with a certain level of confidence by responding to a question from a female examiner in a mini dialogue format (e.g., “What will happen?” - Target: “Maybe, we will run out of gas”). |
Listeners were asked to make two consecutive judgments. They were first asked to judge whether the speaker intended to convey some level of confidence by clicking on a YES. |
Experiment 1. Six native Canadian English speakers (mean age of 22.8 years, three female and three male). Experiment 2. A total of 72 native speakers of Canadian English were recruited from McGill University and consented to serve as listeners in the study (37 females and 35 males, mean age of 24.8 years - from 18 to 35 YO ; mean education of 16.34 years, from 13 to 21 YO). |
Number 4
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Objective: To Investigate the time course and neural responses underlying a listener’s ability to evaluate speaker confidence from combined verbal and vocal cues. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Recordings were selected for four different actors (two females and two males, aged from 19-25, 24 triplets/speaker); these speakers produced the most perceptually salient distinctions in the low to high levels of expressed confidence based on ratings from 60 listeners in a validation study. |
96 stimulus triplets were selected from a database of vocal confidence recordings (Jiang and Pell, 2014). A stimulus was composed of a lexical phrase communicating one of three distinct levels of confidence (confident, close-to-confident, unconfident), followed by the main utterance that was linguistically identical across confidence conditions, but produced in a tone of voice that was congruent with the lexical phrase. |
30 university students consented to participate in the electroencephalogram (EEG) experiment (15 female/15 male, mean age of 22.6 years, range from 18 to 30 YO). All were right-handed, native Canadian English speakers who took part in a companion study focusing on vocal confidence perception. |
Number 5
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Objective: To test whether people’s subjective voice-based trait judgments are predictive of the Supreme Court of the US outcomes. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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1634 oral arguments made by 916 distinct male advocates. The stimuli for this study were drawn from oral arguments made in the Supreme Court of the US between 1998 and 2012. Use of identical two to three seconds of content delivered at the outset of each argument: “Mr. Chief Justice, (and) may it please the Court”. |
Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) rated the voice clips of the Supreme Court advocates. About half |
916 male advocates; 634 raters (321 female). |
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(321) of the 634 distinct participants who completed our survey were female. |
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Participants were asked to rate the voice clips of Supreme Court advocates on a scale of 1 to 7 in terms of aggressiveness, attractiveness, confidence, intelligence, masculinity, and trustworthiness. Each participant rated 66 voice recordings. |
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Number 6
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Objective: Examine the temporal neural dynamics underlying a listener’s ability to infer speaker confidence from vocal cues during speech processing and investigate how and when the brain responds to expressed confidence in the vocal channel of speech, to provide new data on how listeners infer key aspects of a speaker’s mental state (i.e., “feeling of knowing”). |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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The EEG study used recordings from two male and two female speakers who encoded the most salient distinctions in the low to high levels of confidence when judged by native listeners in the validation study. Altogether, 384 recordings (96 statements and four confidence levels) were chosen as the experimental stimuli. Another 480 utterances that contained an initial lexical phrase for inferring confidence (e.g., “I’m positive…”, “Maybe…”) were also presented for the purpose of a companion study investigating the effects of verbal cues on vocal confidence perception (for these items, sentences were identical to the critical stimuli but included an initial lexical phrase that was not removed prior to the EEG experiment). |
96 stimulus “quartets” were selected from a database of vocal expressions of confidence. Within each quartet, identical statements expressed either a confident, close-to-confident, unconfident, or neutral intending message based only on changes in tone of voice. The 96 statements varied in communicative function: 32 were descriptions of fact (e.g., “She has access to the building”), 32 were statements of judgment (e.g., “He’s too old to split the wood”), and 32 were statements of intention (e.g., “We’ll help them with it”). |
To production - used recordings by two male and two female speakers. To perception - 30 university students (15 female/15 male, mean age 22.6 years, range from 18 to 30 YO), native Canadian English speakers, right-handed. None had suffered from major psychiatric or neurological illness, had speech or hearing problems, or had participated in our previous studies. |
Number 7
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Objective: To test to what extent different levels of intonation are related to persuasion and whether for some recipients the threat posed by the message information might become too strong to face. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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An actress with sufficient control over her voice was selected and directed by the first author to produce three versions of the health message which varied on the dimension of intonation (low, moderate, and low). |
Study 1. 130 respondents listened to a health message with either a low, moderate, or high level of intonation. |
Study 1. 130 Dutch student participants (76.2% females), ranging from 17 to 32 YO, randomly distributed over the following conditions: low intonation condition; moderate intonation condition; high intonation condition. |
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Study 2. 143 respondents. The same manipulations of intonation were applied, but half of the respondents were affirmed before they listened to the persuasive message. Intention to increase fruit and vegetable intake was used as a dependent variable. |
Study 2: 143 participants (72.7% females), who varied in age from 17 to 31 YO; self-affirmation conditions: low, moderate, high level of intonation; no self-affirmation conditions: low, moderate, high level of intonation. |
Number 8
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Objective: To verify the influence of levodopa and of the adapted Lee Silverman Vocal Treatment Method on prosodic parameters employed by parkinsonian patients. |
Global design: Production |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Recording of utterances produced in four stages: expressing attitudes of certainty and doubt and declarative and interrogative modalities. The sentences were recorded under the effect of levodopa (on), without the effect of levodopa (off), and before and after speech therapy during the on and off periods. |
No perceptual evaluation done. |
Ten patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease using levodopa, consisting of five men ranging from 59 to 88 YO and five women, ranging from 59 to 75 YO. |
Number 9
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Objective: To verify how fluent speakers of Brazilian Portuguese perceive the expression of certainty and doubt attitudes on stutterers’ speech. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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12 stutterers (EG) and 12 non- stutterers (CG) recorded two utterances in each of the three forms studied (neutral, certainty, and doubt) |
60 judges have participated: 30 judged CG’s utterances and 30 judged EG’s utterances. |
60 male judges ranging from 20 to 40 YO. 24 participants, 12 with stuttering and 12 without stuttering for speech data. |
Number 10
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Objective: To examine the role of speech temporal organization on the expression for attitudes of certainty and doubt in a group of adults who stutter, comparing such analysis with a group of speech-fluent adults. |
Global design: Production |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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10 key phrases that were produced in the neutral form, expressing doubt and certainty, totaling 840 utterances. |
No perceptual evaluation done. |
24 individuals, 12 who stuttered (EG1 and EG2) and 12 non-stuttering (CG). |
Number 11
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Objective: This study examined how gaze and speech rate affect the perceptions of a speaker. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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The speaker was a 23 YO female graduate student. The speaker wore a black suit and glasses, showing her shoulders and head. Two gazes were directed at the camera: 8% of the total visual recording time (low gaze) and 83% of total visual recording time (high gaze). A group of recordings with a slow speech rate (330 syllables/min) and another group with a fast speech rate (510 syllables/min.), based on the average speech rate of 420 words/min. Pitch was set constant during the editing process. This produced four stimulus types: low gaze + fast speech, low gaze + slow speech, high gaze + fast speech, and high gaze + slow speech. |
Participants were divided into four groups according to stimulus gaze (high gaze + low gaze groups) and stimulus speech rate (fast speech + slow speech groups). Participants were initially told that the aim of the study was to examine participants’ comprehension of a provided communication. Participants were shown a static image of the speaker for five seconds, so that they could become accustomed to the study environment. Participants were asked to listen to and observe the speaker from the perspective of a person who is attending the conference. |
466 students with a mean age of 19.6 years. |
Number 12
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Objective: To test the hypothesis that the extensions at the end of the declarative utterances, or uptalk, can differentiate the conflicting functions of the increase of the tone. To verify whether the listeners assign different levels of certainty to the increase of tone and the prolongations. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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For each utterance with a rising contour, a matched utterance was digitally stylized with a falling contour using the PSOLA function on PRAAT. Likewise, for each utterance with a falling contour, a matched utterance was digitally created with a rising contour. The beginning of the rise or fall was kept the same. The upward and downward of the contour was multiplied or divided by a factor of 1.5 and then further stylized to smooth out the contour. In this way, the same item could be heard with and without uptalk. |
Experiment 1. 48 utterance pairs were selected from a specially compiled corpus of spontaneous speech. Speakers created spontaneous sentence frames to convey celebrity facts to an addressee who attempted to select the celebrity out of an array. For example, upon reading place of birth: Brooklyn, the speaker might say to the addressee, “This actor was born in Brooklyn, New York.” The utterance pairs consisted of two sentences spontaneously produced by the same speaker; for example, “I have two children. I was the princess of Wales.” The first utterance of the pair had either rising prolonged pitch (n=12), rising non-prolonged pitch (n=12), falling prolonged pitch (n=12), or falling non- prolonged pitch (n=12). |
All 26 participants were native English speakers, students from The University of California Santa Cruz. |
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Experiment 2 and 3. The same 48 stimuli were used as in Experiment 1. In addition, 48 filler stimuli were created. The filler stimuli were of two types. The first had the target word in the first utterance. The second did not contain the target word. When the target word was presented in the stimulus, there was a 1000ms pause until the next trial started. |
Experiment 2. 21 students participated. |
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Experiment 3. 48 students participated. |
Number 13
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Objective: To assess the effect of variation in speech rate on comprehension and persuasiveness of a message presented in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis to native and non-native listeners. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Eight banking product descriptions under one of four conditions: normal rate (155 words/minute) with no background noise, normal rate with multi-talker background noise (+6 dB SNR), fast-normal (178 words/minute) with no background noise, and fast-normal with multi-talker background noise. |
Participants rated each product on a scale from 1-5 (where 1 = not useful at all, and 5 = extremely useful), and answered two true/false questions about the product description they had just heard. |
80 non-native English speakers and 80 native Australian English speakers. |
Number 14
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Objective: To examine the influence of voice and sex on the credibility of the voice source in a banking telemarketing context as well as with regards to the attitude toward the advertisement and subjects’ behavioral intention. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Two professional actors (a woman and a man) manipulated the intensity and the intonation of the voice and the speech rate for each condition. The professionals, supervised by a phonetician, modified their voices to have a low, moderate, or high intensity, a marked, moderate, or unmarked intonation, and a slow, moderate, or fast speech rate. The message consisted of an advertisement for an ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) card offered by a Canadian bank. |
Source credibility was evaluated with a semantic differential scale containing nine items. This scale ranged from -3 to +3 with zero as a midpoint. Participants were asked if the source of the voice who conveyed the message was competent or incompetent in the financial service field (V1), inspired confidence or distrust (V2), inspired honesty or dishonesty (V3), whether the listener believed or did not believe everything that was said (V4), had or did not have the power of persuasion (V5), was or was not prestigious (V6), had or did not have a similar cultural background (V7), was pleasant or unpleasant (V8), and was attractive or repulsive (V9). Participants completed questionnaires for attitude towards the advertisement and behavioral intention. |
399 native speakers of Australian English. |
Number 15
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Objective: Study the relationship of the right hemisphere with the ability to classify the emotional attitudes of confidence and politeness of the speaker, based on prosody, through the comparison between individuals with and without impairment of the right hemisphere. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Two experiments were carried out. The first one had prosody as a clue to judge confidence level and the second had prosody as a clue to judge the speaker’s politeness. Sentences from six to 11 syllables, recorded by 4 male actors, were used. Half of the utterances were semantically congruent, and half were pseudo utterances only with acoustic clues, both with high, medium, or low confidence levels. 10 male and 10 female judges rated the recordings performed by actors on a scale from 1 to 5, resulting in 45 selected stimulators. |
Experiment 1. Evaluation of statements expressing confidence in two situations: (1) linguistic context provided by an informative semantical content; the sentences began with linguistic phrases indicating high, moderate, or low level of confidence; (2) pseudo utterance of exclusively auditory characteristics, produced with high, moderate, and low degrees of confidence. |
Experiment 1. Nine individuals with involvement of the right hemisphere and 11 individuals without such involvement. All English speakers with an average age of 63 and an average formal education time of 12 years. |
In the second experiment, eight simple commands were used in sentences of three to five syllables recorded by two female actors, in two tones, and two auditory forms: with ascending prosody and descending prosody, and with four different linguistic beginnings: declaratory, direct, indirect, rather indirect and with the word please. The linguistic and prosodic utterances were judged by eight adults. They resulted in 80 linguistic and 32 prosodic-only utterances, totaling 112 selected statements. |
Experiment 2. Evaluation of utterances that express levels of politeness based on linguistic situations expressed by (1) sematic content and prosody and (2) prosody alone. |
Experiment 2. Six individuals with an impairment and 11 without and impairment participated. Their mean age was 65 and they had an average of 12 years of formal education. There was an equal number of men and women. |
Number 16
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Objective: To investigate whether the interlanguage intonation produced by non-native speakers of English might lead to pragmatic differences that could affect their spoken discourse in the expression of certainty and uncertainty. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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A cross-linguistic computerized corpus has been compiled to study Spanish learners of English and English native speakers’ intonation. The speech of both groups of speakers was digitally recorded while they performed two tasks: reading aloud and interpreting short English conversations. The conversations highlight the contrast between different degrees of certainty and uncertainty. |
The data collected in the corpus, totaling over 3 million words, were analyzed acoustically, so that comparable qualitative and quantitative information on the prosodic characteristics produced by the two language user groups could be obtained. |
Two homogeneous groups of undergraduate students: a group of 10 Spanish learners of English and a group of 10 native speakers of English. |
Number 17
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Objective: The objective of this study is twofold: (1) To assess whether children’s feelings of perceived judgment are similar to those of adults and (2) to assess whether children use fewer audiovisual cues for uncertainty in a less systematic way. |
Global design: Production and perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Experiment 1. First, participants were asked a series of questions by the researcher and their responses were filmed using a digital camera. This part of the experiment was set up in such a way that participants could not see the researcher. Second, the same sequence of questions was asked again, for participants to indicate how sure they were that they would recognize the correct answer if they had to find it in a multiple-choice test. Third, the same sequence of questions was asked once more in a multiple-choice paper-and-pencil test, in which the correct answer was mixed with three plausible alternatives. |
Experiment 1. Certain and uncertain speaker utterances from adults and children were collected by asking them a series of factual questions (40 for adults, 30 for children). For adults, the questions came from two sources. First, we selected questions with a single word answer (e.g., “Who wrote Faust?”), and then we added a supplementary list from the Dutch version of the game Trivial Pursuit. For children, we selected questions with a single word answer (e.g., “How much is a dozen?”) only. For both groups questions were selected in a way that different types of responses could be elicited, namely answers, non-answers, certain, and uncertain responses. |
Experiment 1. Twenty adults and 21 children participated as speakers. The adults (11 males, 9 females) were colleagues and students from Tilburg University, between 20 and 50 YO. |
Experiment 2. Detecting uncertainty. 30 adult utterances and 30 child utterances were selected from the corpus of answers collected in the first study. Stimuli were presented on a screen where the judges first saw the stimulus ID (1 through 30) and then the actual stimulus. |
Experiment 2. Judges were instructed to estimate whether speakers were uncertain about their answers or not. Adult judges scored on a seven-point Likert scale, child judges on a five-point Likert scale (using the same facial representation as above) |
Experiment 2. 80 native speakers of Dutch participated as judges, 40 adults and 40 children (20 male and 20 females per group), and all different from the speakers that participated in the production experiments. |
Number 18
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Objective: Because atypical instances of a category are more difficult to classify than typical instances, when speakers refer to these instances their lack of confidence will be demonstrated in a paralinguistic way, that is, in the form of hesitations, filled pauses, or rising prosody. These features can help listeners learn by enabling them to differentiate good from bad examples of a category. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Participants were asked to imagine that they were new employees in the stockroom of an Internet clothing store, where their job was to fill orders. A male “expert teacher” trained the participants on the store color scheme. The voice used for the teacher’s sound recordings was that of a male confederate, who was instructed to speak each color name five times with confidence that varied from very unsure to very sure. 95% of the least confident utterances began with a filled pause (e.g., “uh”, “um”, “mm”), whereas none of the most confident ones did. 92% of the least confident utterances also included rising intonation, whereas none of the most confident utterances did. |
Listeners learned a set of novel color categories from an expert teacher. For half of the categories, the paralinguistic characteristics of the teacher’s utterances were consistent with the category structure: difficult-to-classify instances (i.e., atypical) were marked by unconfident-sounding utterances, and easy-to classify instances (i.e., typical), by confident-sounding ones. For the other half, the characteristics were inconsistent with the category structure. |
36 undergraduates, 22 females and 14 males. |
Number 19
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Objective: In an experiment with 2x2x2 factorial design, several hypotheses derived from the Elaboration Likelihood Model and from phonetics literature were tested. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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Two linguistically similar advertising messages of financial services of high (student loan) versus low (Automatic Teller Machine cards) involvement were recorded by a professional actor using four types of voice (two levels of intonation of voice x two levels of intensity). |
Once exposed to the experimental advertisement, subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire. Credibility was operationalized using two sets of four items each, one measuring “internalization” and the other “identification.” “Internalization” was measured by four 7-point bipolar scales of “trustworthy”, “honest”, “competent”, and “believes in what he says”. Identification was measured by four 7- point bipolar scales of “prestigious”, “same culture as me”, “pleasant”, and “attractive”. |
229 university students. |
Number 20
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Objective: Assess the effects of powerful and powerless speech on the impressions of the speaker and on persuasion. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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To develop the verbal stimuli, we examined the tapes of actual court trials and chose a trial in which a female witness had given her testimony in a style characterized by frequent use of powerless forms (i.e., hedges, intensifiers, rising intonations, especially formal grammar, and polite forms). Actors then reproduced this original testimony (changing only names, dates, places, and editing certain legal technicalities). A female witness powerful-style tape was also made (using the same actors), in which most of the powerless features were omitted, but the substance of the testimony remained unchanged. The “powerless” style is characterized by the frequent use of linguistic features such as intensifiers, hedges, hesitation forms, and questioning intonations. The “powerful” style is marked by less frequent use of these features. |
Subjects were provided either with earphones through which they could hear the stimulus tape (in the oral-presentation conditions) or with envelopes containing one of the four experimental transcripts (in the written-presentation conditions). Subjects rated the witness on a series of 11-point semantic differential-type rating scales with the endpoints: powerful-powerless, competent-incompetent, masculine-feminine, trustworthy not trustworthy, likely able-unlikely able, strong-weak, intelligent-not intelligent, and active-passive. Subjects also used 11-point scales to rate how much they believed the witness, how convincing the witness was, how sympathetic they felt toward the witness, how similar the witness was to them, and how qualified they felt the witness was to testify. Additional questions inquired how responsible and how negligent the defendants were for the victim’s death and how much the defendants should pay the plaintiffs in damages. |
152 undergraduate students (73 male and 79 female). Five additional subjects did not fill in the whole questionnaire and were omitted from the analysis. |
Number 21
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Objective: Study the paralinguistic cues in the speaker when coding confidence and doubt in speech as well as the attributes observed in the speaker when exposed to these cues. |
Global design: Perception |
Corpus (speech production)
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Perceptual evaluation (perception)
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Participants
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The study was conducted in two parts, a recording of linguistically confident texts and another of linguistically doubtful texts. This process generated four texts with two disparate channels and two congruent channels. |
Evaluation of the audio recordings to classify the speakers as trustworthy, experts, and legally competent. Textual characteristics were rated on a scale from zero to 100 and speech features were rated on a scale from zero to nine simultaneously, to establish the pairs of effectiveness of manipulation and to evaluate about 23 personality characteristics and features of speech. The recording was classified as “text and voice confident”, “confident text and voice doubtful”, “doubtful text and confident voice”, “doubtful text with doubtful voice”. About 23 personality characteristics and seven features of speech on a scale from zero to nine were also evaluated. |
To assess trust or doubt: 10 women college students, paid volunteers, were tested one at a time, using peer comparison techniques. They were asked about which pair expressed greater confidence. The order and the peers were randomized. To assess personality and attributes of voice 47 women from a female school, who were paid volunteers, in 4 sessions, were asked to evaluate the ability of law students to practice. |