Quantifying the Role of Prosody in the Perception of Deception
Date
2021-05-05
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Abstract
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.
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Keywords
Deception, Speech Perception
Citation
Rey, L. T. M. (2021). Quantifying the Role of Prosody in the Perception of Deception (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.