The imprint of disposition in social interaction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2016/07/0008/000267Keywords:
disposition, emotional display, mental predicates, iterant speechAbstract
This study considers how listeners perceive and interpret the disposition of others through non-linguistic vocal cues. Changes in F0 and pitch span (measured against a ‘running’ mean of the previous 15 seconds), constellations of sequential tones, and emergent speech rhythms index recognizable states of positive/negative valency, desire, knowledge and/or processing, which together constitute emotional display (these same states correlate with mental predicates in the composition of emotion words. Excerpts of natural conversation were converted to ‘iterant speech’, i.e. speech devoid of lexical content. Listeners were invited to identify speaker disposition, and their ability to do so was remarkably accurate. The results lend support to a theory of vocal affect based on sound-types, rather than sounds.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
