People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human perception of spoken communication as a means to better understand how information is encoded across these channels, focusing on the question What characteristics of communicative context affect listener’s expectations of speech?. To investigate this, we present a novel behavioural task testing whether listeners can discriminate between the true utterance in a dialogue and utterances sampled from other contexts with the same lexical content. We characterize how perception — and subsequent discriminative capability — is affected by different degrees of additional contextual information across both the lexical and non-lexical channel of speech. Results demonstrate that people can effectively discriminate between different prosodic realisations, that non-lexical context is informative, and that this channel provides more salient information than the lexical channel, highlighting the importance of the non-lexical channel in spoken interaction.
Cite as: Wallbridge, S., Bell, P., Lai, C. (2021) It’s Not What You Said, it’s How You Said it: Discriminative Perception of Speech as a Multichannel Communication System. Proc. Interspeech 2021, 2386-2390, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1658
@inproceedings{wallbridge21_interspeech,
author={Sarenne Wallbridge and Peter Bell and Catherine Lai},
title={{It’s Not What You Said, it’s How You Said it: Discriminative Perception of Speech as a Multichannel Communication System}},
year=2021,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2021},
pages={2386--2390},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1658}
}