Browsing by Author "Rey, Lyndon Thomas McIntosh"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Quantifying the Role of Prosody in the Perception of Deception
    (2021-05-05) Rey, Lyndon Thomas McIntosh; Winters, Stephen; Zhao, Richard; Darin, Flynn
    This work investigates the relationship between inflection and perceived honesty in Canadian English, specifically testing whether a terminal rising inflection is perceived as more dishonest than a falling terminal inflection. Canadian English listeners heard pairs of sentence stimuli which differed only in terms of a final falling, neutral, or rising intonation contour and judged which sentence in each pair sounded more “honest”. I found that speech with a rising intonation is perceived as significantly less honest than speech with either flat or falling intonation. Then, I trained an Exemplar model (Johnson, 1997) and a neural network model, which were both able to match listener performance with roughly 60% accuracy. This result is significantly better than chance, but leaves much room for improvement. It provides a realistic view into how intonation clearly influences the perception of honesty, but with it being just one of many factors playing a role in this judgment.