Gender and speech rate in the perception of competence and social attractiveness

The authors' hypotheses were that (a) listeners regard speakers whose global speech rates they judge to be similar to their own as more competent and more socially attractive than speakers whose rates are different from their own and (b) gender influences those perceptions. Participants were 17 male and 28 female listeners; they judged each of 3 male and 3 female speakers in terms of 10 unipolar adjective scales. The authors used 8 of the scales to derive 2 scores describing the extent to which the listener viewed a speaker as competent and socially attractive. The 2 scores were related by trend analyses (a) to the listeners' perceptions of the speakers' speech rates as compared with their own and (b) to comparisons of the actual speech rates of the speakers and listeners. The authors examined trend components of the data by split-plot multiple regression analyses. In general, the results supported both hypotheses. The participants judged speakers with speech rates similar to their own as more competent and socially attractive than speakers with speech rates slower or faster than their own. However, the ratings of competence were significantly influenced by the gender of the listeners, and those of social attractiveness were influenced by the gender of the listeners and the speakers.     

Gender and Speech Rate in the Perception of Competence and Social Attractiveness

Abstract

The authors' hypotheses were that (a) listeners regard speakers whose global speech rates they judge to be similar to their own as more competent and more socially attractive than speakers whose rates are different from their own and (b) gender influences those perceptions. Participants were 17 male and 28 female listeners; they judged each of 3 male and 3 female speakers in terms of 10 unipolar adjective scales. The authors used 8 of the scales to derive 2 scores describing the extent to which the listener viewed a speaker as competent and socially attractive. The 2 scores were related by trend analyses (a) to the listeners' perceptions of the speakers' speech rates as compared with their own and (b) to comparisons of the actual speech rates of the speakers and listeners. The authors examined trend components of the data by split-plot multiple regression analyses. In general, the results supported both hypotheses. The participants judged speakers with speech rates similar to their own as more competent and socially attractive than speakers with speech rates slower or faster than their own. However, the ratings of competence were significantly influenced by the gender of the listeners, and those of social attractiveness were influenced by the gender of the listeners and the speakers.     

Ambassadors of gender equality? How use of pair forms versus masculines as generics impacts perception of the speaker

Although the use of gender fair language is strongly promoted in German‐speaking countries, the impact of its use on the way speakers are perceived by others is still unknown. Results of two experimental studies showed that irrespective of their sex, speakers using pair forms rather than generic masculines were perceived more competent by both men and women. Also, they were seen as less sexist by male and female listeners with positive attitudes towards linguistic equality. Findings with respect to the attribution of warmth were more complex: they were not only impacted by language use, but also dependent on speaker's sex and listener's attitude towards linguistic equality. Results are discussed in the context of language and stereotypes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Commonsense beliefs and the identification of familiar voices

Two experiments are reported in which participants attempted to reject the tape‐recorded voice of a stranger and identify by name the voices of three personal associates who differed in their level of familiarity. In Experiment 1 listeners were asked to identify speakers as soon as possible, but were not allowed to change their responses once made. In Experiment 2 listeners were permitted to change their responses over successive presentations of increasing durations of voice segments. Also, in Experiment 2 half of the listeners attempted to identify speakers who spoke in normal‐tone voices, and the remainder attempted to identify the same speakers who spoke in whispers. Separate groups of undergraduate students attempted to predict the performance of the listeners in both experiments. Accuracy of performance depended on the familiarity of speakers and tone of speech. A between‐subjects analysis of rated confidence was diagnostic of accuracy for high familiar and low familiar speakers (Experiment 1), and for moderate familiar and unfamiliar normal‐tone speakers (Experiment 2). A modified between‐subjects analysis assessed across the four levels of familiarity yielded reliable accuracy‐confidence correlations in both experiments. Beliefs about the accuracy of voice identification were inflated relative to the significantly lower actual performance for most of the normal‐tone and whispered‐speech conditions. Forensic significance and generalizations are addressed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of Parkinson's disease on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners

An expressive disturbance of speech prosody has long been associated with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD), but little is known about the impact of dysprosody on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners. Recordings of healthy adults (n=12) and adults with mild to moderate PD (n=21) were elicited in four speech contexts in which prosody serves a primary function in linguistic or emotive communication (phonemic stress, contrastive stress, sentence mode, and emotional prosody). Twenty independent listeners naive to the disease status of individual speakers then judged the intended meanings conveyed by prosody for tokens recorded in each condition. Findings indicated that PD speakers were less successful at communicating stress distinctions, especially words produced with contrastive stress, which were identifiable to listeners. Listeners were also significantly less able to detect intended emotional qualities of Parkinsonian speech, especially for anger and disgust. Emotional expressions that were correctly recognized by listeners were consistently rated as less intense for the PD group. Utterances produced by PD speakers were frequently characterized as sounding sad or devoid of emotion entirely (neutral). Results argue that motor limitations on the vocal apparatus in PD produce serious and early negative repercussions on communication through prosody, which diminish the social-linguistic competence of Parkinsonian adults as judged by listeners.     

The artful dodger: answering the wrong question the right way

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.     

Language Attitudes and Cognitive Mediation

Using an independent samples factorial design, this study examined the roles of accent (standard vs. nonstandard), speech rate (fast vs. medium vs. slow), and age of voice (younger vs. older sounding) on British listeners’ social evaluations of audiotaped voices using the matched-guise technique. In addition, listener judges’ level and nature of cognitive responding, their interpretations of the targets’ utterances and the (mediumterm) recognition value of messages were uniquely explored as a function of these three independent variables. In general, standard speakers were upgraded on competencerelated traits but downgraded on solidarity traits irrespective of age, with older speakers being perceived as less hesitant but more benevolent than their younger counterparts. An Age × Accent interaction effect showed that older-sounding standard speakers were judged the most competent and older-sounding nonstandard speakers the least competent. Favorable ratings were afforded speakers with medium rates, and slow-talking, younger-sounding speakers were particularly downgraded. All three independent variables affected ratings of listeners’ interpretations of the (same) text, while speaker age was the only effect on the recognition of message material 2 days later. The cognitive responding data showed that listener judges were most positive about the source when the target was fast talking and older sounding and were most negative to the fast-talking, younger-sounding, and standard-accented speaker. The diverse pattern of findings emerging at different levels of analysis underscores the important roles of cognitive mediation in language attitude studies in ways not explored sufficiently previously.     

The role of gesture in communication and thinking

People move their hands as they talk – they gesture. Gesturing is a robust phenomenon, found across cultures, ages, and tasks. Gesture is even found in individuals blind from birth. But what purpose, if any, does gesture serve? In this review, I begin by examining gesture when it stands on its own, substituting for speech and clearly serving a communicative function. When called upon to carry the full burden of communication, gesture assumes a language-like form, with structure at word and sentence levels. However, when produced along with speech, gesture assumes a different form – it becomes imagistic and analog. Despite its form, the gesture that accompanies speech also communicates. Trained coders can glean substantive information from gesture – information that is not always identical to that gleaned from speech. Gesture can thus serve as a research tool, shedding light on speakers’ unspoken thoughts. The controversial question is whether gesture conveys information to listeners not trained to read them. Do spontaneous gestures communicate to ordinary listeners? Or might they be produced only for speakers themselves? I suggest these are not mutually exclusive functions – gesture serves as both a tool for communication for listeners, and a tool for thinking for speakers.     

How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices

Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within‐person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only ‘tell people apart’ (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also ‘tell people together’ (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In the current study, we investigated how such natural within‐person variability affects voice identity perception. Using voices from a popular TV show, listeners, who were either familiar or unfamiliar with this show, sorted naturally varying voice clips from two speakers into clusters to represent perceived identities. Across three independent participant samples, unfamiliar listeners perceived more identities than familiar listeners and frequently mistook exemplars from the same speaker to be different identities. These findings point towards a selective failure in ‘telling people together’. Our study highlights within‐person variability as a key feature of voices that has striking effects on (unfamiliar) voice identity perception. Our findings not only open up a new line of enquiry in the field of voice perception but also call for a re‐evaluation of theoretical models to account for natural variability during identity perception.     

Speaker overestimation of communication effectiveness and fear of negative evaluation: Being realistic is unrealistic

Speakers systematically overestimate their communication effectiveness (Keysar & Henly, 2002). We argue that doing so is adaptive, reducing the risk of social anxiety and withdrawal from social situations. This hypothesis was tested by having speakers who scored low and high for fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a hallmark of social phobia, attempt to convey a specific meaning of ambiguous statements to a listener and then estimate their communication effectiveness. Low-FNE speakers consistently overestimated their effectiveness, expecting the listener to understand their intended meaning more often than listeners actually did. In contrast, high-FNE speakers’ estimates of communication effectiveness were consistent with the listener’s actual understanding. Signal detection analysis revealed that low- and high-FNE speakers were equally able to discriminate communication success from failure, but low-FNE speakers exhibited a stronger positive response bias. In conclusion, overestimating one’s communication effectiveness is adaptive, and accurate estimation is associated with dysfunction.     

Speaker–listener incompatibility: Joint and separate processing in risky choice framing

Framing effects are considered in a conversational framework using the well-known Asian Disease problem [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458]. Speakers’ preferred message framing is examined and its corresponding persuasiveness is assessed using listeners’ responses. The results show that speakers exhibit a marked and consistent preference for positive over negative framing (Experiment 1). Judged from listeners’ responses, this preference is effective for promoting riskless, but not risky options. The incompatibility between speakers and listeners may be resolved by noting that speakers can jointly (i.e., comparatively) assess the information and the persuasive qualities of alternative frames. In contrast, listeners are exposed only to one of these frames and, consequently, can only assess the information separately (i.e., non-comparatively). Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that no incompatibility exists when both speakers and listeners are either in separate, or in joint evaluation mode. Differences between risky choice and attribute framing [Levin, I.P., Schneider, S.L., & Gaeth, G.J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: a typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76, 149–188] are briefly discussed.     

Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect

Talkers are recognized more accurately if they are speaking the listeners’ native language rather than an unfamiliar language. This “language familiarity effect” has been shown not to depend upon comprehension and must instead involve language sound patterns. We further examine the level of sound‐pattern processing involved, by comparing talker recognition in foreign languages versus two varieties of English, by (a) English speakers of one variety, (b) English speakers of the other variety, and (c) non‐native listeners (more familiar with one of the varieties). All listener groups performed better with native than foreign speech, but no effect of language variety appeared: Native listeners discriminated talkers equally well in each, with the native variety never outdoing the other variety, and non‐native listeners discriminated talkers equally poorly in each, irrespective of the variety's familiarity. The results suggest that this talker recognition effect rests not on simple familiarity, but on an abstract level of phonological processing.     

Subjective reactions to phonological variation in Costa Rican Spanish

The results of a subjective reaction test on a sample of 440 Costa Ricans indicate that in societies where educational levels are not generally high, social status groups may be differentiated phonologically by the use of prestigeful features rather than by stigmatized ones, contrary to findings regarding social dialects in the United States. Participating listeners discriminated between three speakers whose reading of a Spanish text varied only according to their percentage use of stigmatized and prestige phonological variables—specifically, accent shift, vowel alternation, and consonantal alternation. As hypothesized, listeners assigned occupational status to, distanced themselves socially from, and attributed personality and socioeconomically related traits to speakers according to the degree of prestigefulness or stigmatization of the latter's speech. However, whereas listeners could distinguish well between the prestige speaker, on the one hand, and the intermediate and stigmatized speakers on the other, they barely differentiated between the latter two. Whereas male and female listeners did not differ significantly from each other in their reactions, contrary to expectation, older listeners, compared to younger ones, significantly more often discriminated between speakers in the expected direction, confirming further that sociolinguistic competence is acquired gradually.This is a revised version of a paper presented at a meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, 1978. I would like to thank Robert L. Cooper, Adrienne Lehrer, Susan U. Phillips, Mitchell A. Seligson, and Patricia Van Metre for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also wish to express my gratitude to the directors of the high schools that cooperated with this project, and to Jovita Castillo, Gabriel Castilli, and Francisco Mejía Mejía for their help in the construction of the questionnaire used in the study.     

Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left- (LHD) and right- (RHD) hemisphere-damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences which include one or more Intonational Phrase level prosodic boundaries. Acoustic analyses of subjects' productions of three sentence types-parentheticals, appositives, and tags-showed that LHD speakers, compared to RHD and normal controls, exhibited impairments in the control of temporal parameters signalling phrase boundaries, including inconsistent patterns of pre-boundary lengthening and longer-than-normal pause durations in non-boundary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, a perception test presented to a group of normal native listeners showed listeners experienced greatest difficulty in identifying the presence or absence of boundaries in the productions of the RHD speakers. The findings support a cue lateralization hypothesis in which prosodic domain plays an important role.     

Limited visual control of the intelligibility of speech in face-to-face dialogue

Speakers are thought to articulate individual words in running speech less carefully whenever additional nonacoustic information can help listeners recognize what is said (Fowler & Housum, 1987; Lieberman, 1963). Comparing single words excerpted from spontaneous dialogues and control tokens of the same words read by the same speakers in lists, Experiment 1 yielded a significant but general effect of visual context: Tokens introducing 71 new entities in dialogues in which participants could see one another’s faces were more degraded (less intelligible to 54 naive listeners) than were tokens of the same words from dialogues with sight lines blocked. Loss of clarity was not keyed to momentto-moment visual behavior. Subjects with clear sight lines looked at each other too rarely to account for the observed effect. Experiment 2 revealed that tokens of 60 words uttered while subjects were looking at each other were significantly less degraded (in length and in intelligibility to 72 subjects) vis-à-vis controls than were spontaneous tokens of the same words produced when subjects were looking elsewhere. Intelligibility loss was mitigated only when listeners looked at speakers. Two separate visual effects are discussed, one of the global availability and the other of the local use of the interlocutor’s face.     

Relevance of the listener’s motor system in recalling phrases enacted by the speaker

Memory for series of action phrases improves in listeners when speakers accompany each phrase with congruent gestures compared to when speakers stay still. Studies reveal that the listeners’ motor system, at encoding, plays a crucial role in this enactment effect. We present two experiments on gesture observation, which explored the role of the listeners’ motor system at recall. The participants listened to the phrases uttered by a speaker in two conditions in each experiment. In the gesture condition, the speaker uttered the phrases with accompanying congruent gestures, and in the no-gesture condition, the speaker stayed still while uttering the phrases. The participants were then invited, in both conditions of the experiments, to perform a motor task while recalling the phrases proffered by the speaker. The results revealed that the advantage of observing gestures on memory disappears if the listeners move at recall arms and hands (same motor effectors moved by the speaker, Experiment 1a), but not when the listeners move legs and feet (different motor effectors from those moved by the speaker, Experiment 1b). The results suggest that the listeners’ motor system is involved not only during the encoding of action phrases uttered by a speaker but also when recalling these phrases during retrieval.     

Dichotic Perception of Mandarin Tones by Chinese and American Listeners

The dichotic perception of Mandarin tones by native and nonnative listeners was examined in order to investigate the lateralization of lexical tone. Twenty American listeners with no tone language background and 20 Chinese listeners were asked to identify dichotically presented tone pairs by identifying which tone they heard in each ear. For the Chinese listeners, 57% of the total errors occurred via the left ear, indicating a significant right ear advantage. However, the American listeners revealed no significant ear preference, with 48% of the errors attributable to the left ear. These results indicated that Mandarin tones are predominantly processed in the left hemisphere by native Mandarin speakers, whereas they are bilaterally processed by American English speakers with no prior tone experience. The results also suggest that the left hemisphere superiority for native Mandarin tone processing is similar to native processing of other tone languages.     

Processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese

The processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese were investigated in a speeded classification task. Since in Chinese, unlike in English, tones convey lexically meaningful information, native speakers of these languages may process combinations of segmental and suprasegment,al information differently. Subjects heard consonant-vowel syllables varying on a consonantal (segmental) dimension and either a Mandarin Chinese or constant-pitch (non-Mandarin) suprasegmental dimension. The English listeners showed mutual integrality with the Mandarin Chinese stimuli, but not the constant-pitch stimuli. The native Chinese listeners processed these dimensions with mutual integrality for both the Mandarin Chinese and the constant-pitch stimuli. These results were interpreted in terms of the linguistic function and the structure of suprasegmental information in Chinese and English. The results suggest that the way listeners perceive speech depends on the interaction between the structure of the signal and the processing strategies of the listener.     

Body movements of male and female speakers and their influence on perceptions of personality

Men and women score differently on some personality traits and people’s behavior reflects who they are. Therefore, males and females could be expected to express themselves differently on a behavioral level. To test this idea we turned the public performances of speakers (20 female and 20 male) into stick figure movies. Students of the University of Vienna (n = 150) rated these movies on scales measuring the Big Five personality traits. The participants experienced difficulties in ascribing the correct sex to the stick figures. Nevertheless, stick figures representing male speakers received higher ratings for extraversion and emotional stability than stick figure animations of female speakers. In addition, gender stereotypes seemed to influence the participants’ ratings. Agreeableness, for instance, was preferably classified as female trait. In conclusion, our results suggest that body motion conveys social information, that men and women present themselves differently, and that people’s judgments are influenced by gender stereotypes.     

Exploring the Process of Inference Generation in Sarcasm: A Review of Normal and Clinical Studies

This article evaluates two theoretical accounts of how sarcasm is understood; the traditional model, which asserts that listeners derive a counterfactual inference from the sarcastic comment, and relevance theory, which asserts that listeners recognize sarcasm as a scornful echo of a previous assertion. Evidence from normal speakers provides only partial support for both theories. Evidence from brain-injured populations suggests that aspects of the pragmatic process can be arrested in ways not predicted by either theory. It is concluded that sarcasm is more effortful to process than nonsarcastic comments and that inferences about the facts of the situation and the mental state of the speaker (e.g., attitudes, knowledge, and intentions) are important to comprehending sarcasm. It is questioned whether inferences about mental state are relatively more difficult for brain-injured subjects and, if so, whether this is a continuum of difficulty or reflects reliance upon different cognitive processes.