Using prosody to produce trust and doubt

Work presented at a 2022 ASA meeting Thomas, 2022 demonstrated that American English talkers use acoustic prosodic variables to distinguish attitudes of incredulity and trust from a “neutral tone of voice” when asking WH-questions. The present study largely replicates these findings in new data. These data comprise both WH-questions and Yes/No questions, read by a new set of talkers in six imagined scenarios. In the previous study, “doubt” was likely confounded with “authority” due to the imagined scenario used to elicit the stimuli. In the present study, the three attitudes (doubt, neutral, trust) were crossed with dominance (participant was +/− dominant relative to their imagined conversational partner). This study examines additional acoustic variables, including the variability of word duration within utterance and the F0 slope of the longest word in each utterance. Averaging across the + /− dominance conditions and the utterance type (yes/no or WH question), duration-based variables reliably distinguished doubting from neutral utterances (with doubting utterances showing greater duration and greater variability in word duration). In contrast, F0-based variables differentiated trusting from neutral utterances, with trusting utterances showing a higher F0 over the course of the entire utterance.