To believe or not to believe? How voice and accent information in speech alter listener impressions of trust

Abstract

Our decision to believe what another person says can be influenced by vocally expressed confidence in speech and by whether the speaker–listener are members of the same social group. The dynamic effects of these two information sources on neurocognitive processes that promote believability impressions from vocal cues are unclear. Here, English Canadian listeners were presented personal statements ( She has access to the building) produced in a confident or doubtful voice by speakers of their own dialect (in-group) or speakers from two different “out-groups” (regional or foreign-accented English). Participants rated how believable the speaker is for each statement and event-related potentials (ERPs) were analysed from utterance onset. Believability decisions were modulated by both the speaker’s vocal confidence level and their perceived in-group status. For in-group speakers, ERP effects revealed an early differentiation of vocally expressed confidence (i.e., N100, P200), highlighting the motivational significance of doubtful voices for drawing believability inferences. These early effects on vocal confidence perception were qualitatively different or absent when speakers had an accent; evaluating out-group voices was associated with increased demands on contextual integration and re-analysis of a non-native representation of believability (i.e., increased N400, late negativity response). Accent intelligibility and experience with particular out-group accents each influenced how vocal confidence was processed for out-group speakers. The N100 amplitude was sensitive to out-group attitudes and predicted actual believability decisions for certain out-group speakers. We propose a neurocognitive model in which vocal identity information (social categorization) dynamically influences how vocal expressions are decoded and used to derive social inferences during person perception.

Comment: The Next Frontier: Prosody Research Gets Interpersonal

“…These questions were recently evaluated in a series of ERP studies (Jiang et al, 2020; Jiang & Pell, 2015, 2016). Data show that, like emotional expressions, vocal expressions of confidence are rapidly assigned meaning from the acoustic onset of speech and refined with increased exposure to the input (Jiang & Pell, 2015, 2016).…”

“…For example, when listeners perceive speakers as outgroup members based on having a regional or foreign accent, it appears that the nature and time course of processes which extract social meaning from their vocal expression are systematically altered (Jiang et al, 2020). In this study, in which participants rated how much they believed the speaker based on their vocally expressed confidence, P200 effects, which mark the relative salience of doubtful versus confident expressions from utterance onset, were only observed for in-group speakers who shared the same accent as the listener.…”

“…In this study, in which participants rated how much they believed the speaker based on their vocally expressed confidence, P200 effects, which mark the relative salience of doubtful versus confident expressions from utterance onset, were only observed for in-group speakers who shared the same accent as the listener. Rapid social categorization of the speaker as an outgroup member reduced and delayed operations which extract confidence-related information from vocal expressions; downstream, this seemed to increase overall demands on contextual integration with language and to form a social impression of outgroup speaker believability (see Jiang et al, 2020, for details). These data imply that social identity information can influence vocal expression analysis prior to the stage of salience detection, with long-lasting effects on how communicative representations are built.…”

Prediction of Inter-Personal Trust and Team Familiarity From Speech: A Double Transfer Learning Approach

“…Several studies have investigated the relationship between trust perception and speech [12][13][14][15][16]. In [12], voice models were evaluated to investigate the correlation between basic acoustical parameters and the perception of low and high trust.…”

“…Recently, studies conducted in [15] investigated how the perception of trust is affected by the voice and accent of a speaker. Trust was evaluated as if a statement is believable or not, using confident and doubtful voices.…”