Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature

Abstract

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.

Vocal signals only impact speakers’ own emotions when they are self-attributed

“…This is consistent with reports showing that confidence in perceptual judgements can be impacted by arousal (Allen et al, 2016), and calls for the development of embodied models of metacognition. It would be especially interesting to test whether a similar vocal feedback effect extends to general epistemic judgements, e. g. using feedback with modified fundamental frequency to influence a participant's judgements of confidence in non-emotional tasks, such as how certain they are that they see a certain stimulus in a noisy visual search task (see also Goupil, Ponsot, Richardson, Reyes & Aucouturier, 2021).…”

Production Strategies of Vocal Attitudes

“…Previous studies have provided insights on how to decode attitudes from vocal signals. Cognitive psychology studies have identified acoustic signatures used by listeners to infer attitudes from speech [3], e.g. showing how pitch can affect the general perception of dominance [4] or friendliness [5].…”

The shallow of your smile: the ethics of expressive vocal deep-fakes

“…The human facial and vocal expressions have evolved as signals to inform and manipulate others [ 1 , 2 ]. By continuously modulating our facial muscles and the phonatory and articulatory structures of our vocal apparatus, we provide a rich, flexible non-verbal back-channel to our daily conversations, communicating our emotional states such as joy or surprise [ 3 , 4 ], our social intents such as warmth or dominance [ 5 , 6 ], or our epistemic attitudes, such as certainty or doubt [ 7 , 8 ].…”