| 1. |
- Anikin, Andrey
(författare)
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A moan of pleasure should be breathy : The effect of voice quality on the meaning of human nonverbal vocalizations
- 2020
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Ingår i: Phonetica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0031-8388 .- 1423-0321. ; 77:5, s. 327-349
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prosodic features, such as intonation and voice intensity, have a well-documented role in communicating emotion, but less is known about the role of laryngeal voice quality in speech and particularly in nonverbal vocalizations such as laughs and moans. Potentially, however, variations in voice quality between tense and breathy may convey rich information about the speaker’s physiological and affective state. In this study breathiness was manipulated in synthetic human nonverbal vocalizations by adjusting the relative strength of upper harmonics and aspiration noise. In experiment 1 (28 prototypes × 3 manipulations = 84 sounds), otherwise identical vocalizations with tense versus breathy voice quality were associated with higher arousal (general alertness), higher dominance, and lower valence (unpleasant states). Ratings on discrete emotions in experiment 2 (56 × 3 = 168 sounds) confirmed that breathiness was reliably associated with positive emotions, particularly in ambiguous vocalizations (gasps and moans). The spectral centroid did not fully account for the effect of manipulation, confirming that the perceived change in voice quality was more specific than a general shift in timbral brightness. Breathiness is thus involved in communicating emotion with nonverbal vocalizations, possibly due to changes in low-level auditory salience and perceived vocal effort.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Anikin, Andrey
(författare)
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The link between auditory salience and emotion intensity
- 2020
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Ingår i: Cognition and Emotion. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0269-9931 .- 1464-0600. ; 34:6, s. 1246-1259
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To ensure that listeners pay attention and do not habituate, emotionally intense vocalizations may be under evolutionary pressure to exploit processing biases in the auditory system by maximising their bottom-up salience. This “salience code” hypothesis was tested using 128 human nonverbal vocalizations representing eight emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, pain, pleasure, and sadness. As expected, within each emotion category salience ratings derived from pairwise comparisons strongly correlated with perceived emotion intensity. For example, while laughs as a class were less salient than screams of fear, salience scores almost perfectly explained the perceived intensity of both amusement and fear considered separately. Validating self-rated salience evaluations, high- vs. low-salience sounds caused 25% more recall errors in a short-term memory task, whereas emotion intensity had no independent effect on recall errors. Furthermore, the acoustic characteristics of salient vocalizations were similar to those previously described for non-emotional sounds (greater duration and intensity, high pitch, bright timbre, rapid modulations, and variable spectral characteristics), confirming that vocalizations were not salient merely because of their emotional content. The acoustic code in nonverbal communication is thus aligned with sensory biases, offering a general explanation for some non-arbitrary properties of human and animal high-arousal vocalizations.
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| 4. |
- Anikin, Andrey
(författare)
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The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations
- 2020
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Ingår i: Bioacoustics. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0952-4622 .- 2165-0586. ; 29:2, s. 226-247
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The communicative role of nonlinear vocal phenomena remains poorly understood since they are difficult to manipulate or even measure with conventional tools. In this study parametric voice synthesis was employed to add pitch jumps, subharmonics/sidebands, and chaos to synthetic human nonverbal vocalizations. In Experiment 1 (86 participants, 144 sounds), chaos was associated with lower valence, and subharmonics with higher dominance. Arousal ratings were not noticeably affected by any nonlinear effects, except for a marginal effect of subharmonics. These findings were extended in Experiment 2 (83 participants, 212 sounds) using ratings on discrete emotions. Listeners associated pitch jumps, subharmonics, and especially chaos with aversive states such as fear and pain. The effects of manipulations in both experiments were particularly strong for ambiguous vocalizations, such as moans and gasps, and could not be explained by a non-specific measure of spectral noise (harmonics-to-noise ratio) – that is, they would be missed by a conventional acoustic analysis. In conclusion, listeners interpret nonlinear vocal phenomena quite flexibly, depending on their type and the kind of vocalization in which they occur. These results showcase the utility of parametric voice synthesis and highlight the need for a more fine-grained analysis of voice quality in acoustic research.
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| 5. |
- Johansson, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Color Sound Symbolism in Natural Languages
- 2020
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Ingår i: Language and Cognition. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1866-9859 .- 1866-9808. ; 12:1, s. 56-83
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates the underlying cognitive processes of sound–color associations by connecting perceptual evidence from research on cross-modal correspondences to sound symbolic patterns in the words for colors in natural languages. Building upon earlier perceptual experiments, we hypothesized that sonorous and bright phonemes would be over-represented in the words for bright and saturated colors. This hypothesis was tested on eleven color words and related concepts (red–green, yellow–blue, black–white, gray, night–day, dark–light) from 245 language families. Textual data was transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and each phoneme was described acoustically using high-quality IPA recordings. These acoustic measurements were then correlated with the luminance and saturation of each color obtained from cross-linguistic color-naming data in the World Color Survey. As expected, vowels with high brightness and sonority ratings were over-represented in the words for colors with high luminance, while sonorous consonants were more common in the words for saturated colors. We discuss these results in relation to lexicalization patterns and the links between iconicity and perceptual cross-modal associations.
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| 6. |
- Johansson, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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The typology of sound symbolism : Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features
- 2020
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Ingår i: Linguistic Typology. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1430-0532 .- 1613-415X. ; 24:2, s. 253-310
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list’s ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) diagrammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world, and could therefore have originated as a bootstrapping mechanism, which can help us understand the bio-cultural origins of human language, the mental lexicon and language diversity.
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| 7. |
- Tjøstheim, Trond A., et al.
(författare)
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The Cognitive Philosophy of Communication
- 2020
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Ingår i: Philosophies. - : MDPI AG. - 2409-9287. ; 5(4):39
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Numerous species use different forms of communication in order to successfully interact in their respective environment. This article seeks to elucidate limitations of the classical conduit metaphor by investigating communication from the perspectives of biology and artificial neural networks. First, communication is a biological natural phenomenon, found to be fruitfully grounded in an organism’s embodied structures and memory system, where specific abilities are tied to procedural, semantic, and episodic long-term memory as well as to working memory. Second, the account explicates differences between non-verbal and verbal communication and shows how artificial neural networks can communicate by means of ontologically non-committal modelling. This approach enables new perspectives of communication to emerge regarding both sender and receiver. It is further shown that communication features gradient properties that are plausibly divided into a reflexive and a reflective form, parallel to knowledge and reflection.
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