Prosody alone can invert a spoken message’s meaning from positive to negative

Evidence

People use several information sources to perceive and interpret emotions. Visual information, such as facial expressions, is most informative, but auditory, prosodic cues in the speech signal also provide important cues for emotion perception. For instance, prosodic cues may alter the meaning of a spoken message, as in the case of irony: the meaning of an utterance like “I like roses” can be interpreted as positive (I do like roses) or negative (I do not like roses), depending on the applied prosody. Prosodic cues, then, are acoustic parameters in speech, such as pitch, intensity, and tempo, from which a normal-hearing listener may perceive emotion in the speech signal (Banse and Scherer 1996 ; Scherer 2003 ; Coutinho and Dibben 2013 ). In an ideal communicative setting both visual and auditory information is available. Everyday communication settings, however, may frequently deprive the listener of visual information, (e.g., during a telephone conversation) so that listeners have to rely on auditory information only. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1353

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines prosodic cues as pitch, intensity, and tempo acoustic parameters carrying emotion.
• SHARE: Send to the audiologist friend who deals with hearing-impaired phone users — the point that phone calls strip visual emotion cues entirely.