COMM 415 1st Edition Lecture 10 Outline of Last Lecture I Paralanguage Outline of Current Lecture II Encoding Factors a sex differences b age III Decoding a speaker qualities b rate c amount of talk d pitch e attractive voices f recognizing a maternal voice g recall IV Interactive Aspects a accent dialect b interruptions c tempo d loudness e duration Current Lecture A sex differences paralanguage These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute A the easiest individual difference to identify form the voice B fundamental frequency pitch larynx vocal chords C detecting speaker sex in preadolescents 26 children age 4 14 read a standard passage judges correctly guessed their sex 81 of the time there was no anatomical basis yet for the difference in male and female voices boys appear to pronounce formant vowels at lower frequency than girls a learned behavior B age I Decoding Paralanguage A decoding speaker qualities 1 ss listen to speakers reading a standard sentence 2 they had to guess from two photos who the speaker was 3 they guess 76 5 correctly 4 then they listened to voices and had to guess age height weight 5 people who had photos did no better than those in the voice only condition 6 slower speech rate perceptions of older age B rate 1 the faster someone speaks about a subject the more proficient they are about what they speak about C amount of talk 1 positively correlated with perceptions of leadership control power status D pitch 1 made tapes of males answering interview questions 2 varied pitch by 20 high or 20 low 3 high pitched males were judges as less truthful less empathic more nervous than low pitched males E attractive voices 1 student judges listened to 110 30 sec segments of people reading a standard passage 2 voices were rated on attractive unnattractive scale 3 results most attractive voices were 1 loud 2 lack of monotone 3 resonance smooth strong 4 lack of nasality 5 good articulation 4 m judges age 17 30 listened to F voices pronouncing vowel sounds and rated their attractiveness 5 then rated attractiveness of photos 6 those with the attractive voices were also rated as having attractive faces 7 low BMI more attractive voice 8 higher frequency more attractive voice sound younger F recognizing a maternal voice 1 children born with the ability to recognize and discriminate mother s voice 2 tape recordings of mother s voice played 3 ss were 38 4 weeks GA average 4 fetal heart rate FHR monitored 5 tapes of mother s voice increased FHR 6 tapes of strangers voice decreased FHR G recall 1 filled pauses and recall subjects listened to a spoken passage with either filled pauses nonlinguistic interruptions or fluent speech subjects recalled the content of story best when there were filled pauses filled pauses may direct attention to the speech stream this aids in recall recall enhanced with filled pauses II Interactive Aspects A interactive accent dialect 1 accommodation imitation of dialect 2 only in face to face situations 3 unconscious 4 people are excellent at matching the volume of others B interruptions 1 success depends upon difference in loudness between speakers how much loudness increases from normal level of dialogue sometimes interruption leads to interruption C tempo 1 3 7 year olds at day care 2 grad student confederate increase her speech rate 3 across all age levels children reciprocated her change in speech rate and response latency 4 Feldstein found that autistic teens would not match speech rate with parents D loudness 1 triads of same sex strangers students at UCLA had a 10 min conversation 2 then played a prisoner s dilemma game 3 when the students speech rates converged from the beginning to the end of the conversation they were more likely to cooperate in the prisoners dilemma game 4 adjusting speech rate may ease cognitive processing and itself be a form of cooperation E duration 1 long questions produce long answers 2 short questions produce short answers