Comment: The Next Frontier: Prosody Research Gets Interpersonal

Pell, Marc D.; Kotz, Sonja A.

doi:10.1177/1754073920954288

Cited by 23 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Recognition of emotional utterances increased as stimulus intensity increased [ 8 , 62 ], suggesting that discrete (posed) vocal emotions are more clearly differentiated when they are expressed at high intensity levels [ 40 ]. As expected, vocal expressions of negative emotions achieved systematically higher recognition levels for both cultural groups despite there being only one positive emotion under study [ 4 , 22 , 26 ]. Interestingly, while happiness was generally associated with low recognition across languages and stimulus types, this difference was less evident for the Chinese participants when judging stimuli in their native language, Mandarin.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

“…While these and other studies [ 18 – 21 ] exemplify that cultural knowledge modulates emotion perception for faces , research on the voice is far less advanced. Human speech contains both the linguistic message and acoustically rich vocal signals that people utilize to exchange social information and to share emotions [ 22 ]. As people produce an utterance, acoustic features (e.g., changes in pitch, loudness, and duration of speech elements) dynamically reveal the speaker’s emotional state over time [ 6 , 23 ], promoting pancultural recognition of most basic emotions in the voice [ 1 – 3 , 24 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultural differences in vocal expression analysis: Effects of task, language, and stimulus-related factors

Zhang

Pell²

2022

PLoS ONE

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Cultural context shapes the way that emotions are expressed and socially interpreted. Building on previous research looking at cultural differences in judgements of facial expressions, we examined how listeners recognize speech-embedded emotional expressions and make inferences about a speaker’s feelings in relation to their vocal display. Canadian and Chinese participants categorized vocal expressions of emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) expressed at different intensity levels in three languages (English, Mandarin, Hindi). In two additional tasks, participants rated the intensity of each emotional expression and the intensity of the speaker’s feelings from the same stimuli. Each group was more accurate at recognizing emotions produced in their native language (in-group advantage). However, Canadian and Chinese participants both judged the speaker’s feelings to be equivalent or more intense than their actual display (especially for highly aroused, negative emotions), suggesting that similar inference rules were applied to vocal expressions by the two cultures in this task. Our results provide new insights on how people categorize and interpret speech-embedded vocal expressions versus facial expressions and what cultural factors are at play.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural differences in vocal expression analysis: Effects of task, language, and stimulus-related factors

Zhang

Pell²

2022

PLoS ONE

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“…Prosody also appears to be a contextualizing marker of verbal interactions that directly leads listeners to the speaker’s emotional message ( House, 2007 ). The critical role prosody plays in interpersonal and social situations ( Pell and Kotz, 2021 ) may be generated by its perceptual salience, or may lead to heightened sensitivity to prosodic cues in noise.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Changes in the Perception of Emotions in Speech: Assessing Thresholds of Prosody and Semantics Recognition in Noise for Young and Older Adults

et al. 2022

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Older adults process emotions in speech differently than do young adults. However, it is unclear whether these age-related changes impact all speech channels to the same extent, and whether they originate from a sensory or a cognitive source. The current study adopted a psychophysical approach to directly compare young and older adults’ sensory thresholds for emotion recognition in two channels of spoken-emotions: prosody (tone) and semantics (words). A total of 29 young adults and 26 older adults listened to 50 spoken sentences presenting different combinations of emotions across prosody and semantics. They were asked to recognize the prosodic or semantic emotion, in separate tasks. Sentences were presented on the background of speech-spectrum noise ranging from SNR of −15 dB (difficult) to +5 dB (easy). Individual recognition thresholds were calculated (by fitting psychometric functions) separately for prosodic and semantic recognition. Results indicated that: (1). recognition thresholds were better for young over older adults, suggesting an age-related general decrease across channels; (2). recognition thresholds were better for prosody over semantics, suggesting a prosodic advantage; (3). importantly, the prosodic advantage in thresholds did not differ between age groups (thus a sensory source for age-related differences in spoken-emotions processing was not supported); and (4). larger failures of selective attention were found for older adults than for young adults, indicating that older adults experienced larger difficulties in inhibiting irrelevant information. Taken together, results do not support a sole sensory source, but rather an interplay of cognitive and sensory sources for age-related differences in spoken-emotions processing.

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“…Despite pitch and loudness were both essential to the encoding of socio-pragmatic meanings ( Jiang and Pell, 2017 ; Caballero et al, 2018 ; Pell and Kotz, 2021 ), they seemed to act in concert with the lexical tone to form complex interactive patterns when encoding speaker confidence. A previous study ( Zhang et al, 2021 ) on weighting patterns of different acoustic parameters in encoding prominence in four mandarin tones showed that, on the syllable of flat tones, the mean, maximal and minimal pitch contributed more for marking prominent syllables than mean intensity; while on the syllable of contour tones, the mean intensity and intensity variation weighed higher than pitch-related features.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmental and suprasegmental encoding of speaker confidence in Wuxi dialect vowels

Jiang

2022

Front. Psychol.

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IntroductionWuxi dialect is a variation of Wu dialect spoken in eastern China and is characterized by a rich tonal system. Compared with standard Mandarin speakers, those of Wuxi dialect as their mother tongue can be more efficient in varying vocal cues to encode communicative meanings in speech communication. While literature has demonstrated that speakers encode high vs. low confidence in global prosodic cues at the sentence level, it is unknown how speakers’ intended confidence is encoded at a more local, phonetic level. This study aimed to explore the effects of speakers’ intended confidence on both prosodic and formant features of vowels in two lexical tones (the flat tone and the contour tone) of Wuxi dialect.MethodsWords of a single vowel were spoken in confident, unconfident, or neutral tone of voice by native Wuxi dialect speakers using a standard elicitation procedure. Linear-mixed effects modeling and parametric bootstrapping testing were performed.ResultsThe results showed that (1) the speakers raised both F1 and F2 in the confident level (compared with the neutral-intending expression). Additionally, F1 can distinguish between the confident and unconfident expressions; (2) Compared with the neutral-intending expression, the speakers raised mean f0, had a greater variation of f0 and prolonged pronunciation time in the unconfident level while they raised mean intensity, had a greater variation of intensity and prolonged pronunciation time in the confident level. (3) The speakers modulated mean f0 and mean intensity to a larger extent on the flat tone than the contour tone to differentiate between levels of confidence in the voice, while they modulated f0 and intensity range more only on the contour tone.DiscussionThese findings shed new light on the mechanisms of segmental and suprasegmental encoding of speaker confidence and lack of confidence at the vowel level, highlighting the interplay of lexical tone and vocal expression in speech communication.

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Comment: The Next Frontier: Prosody Research Gets Interpersonal

Cited by 23 publications

References 51 publications

Cultural differences in vocal expression analysis: Effects of task, language, and stimulus-related factors

Cultural differences in vocal expression analysis: Effects of task, language, and stimulus-related factors

Age-Related Changes in the Perception of Emotions in Speech: Assessing Thresholds of Prosody and Semantics Recognition in Noise for Young and Older Adults

Segmental and suprasegmental encoding of speaker confidence in Wuxi dialect vowels

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