Quantifying the Role of Prosody in the Perception of Deception

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Arts

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Rey, Lyndon Thomas McIntosh

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Winters, Stephen

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Zhao, Richard
• Darin, Flynn

• Deception
• Speech Perception

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/38845

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/113391