Attitudinal judgments in intonation: Some evidence for a theory

Abstract

In an attempt to resolve the seeming contradiction between lack of direct correspondence between intonation and emotive meaning on the one hand, and a beyond chance recognition of emotions as judged on the basis of prosodic cues on the other, the author examines results of the relevant psycholinguistic studies. The survey includes evidence related to such pertinent issues as recognition accuracy in judgments involving vocal material, prosodic correlates of affect conceived of as dimensional structuring, and the relative contribution of vocal and visual channels in affective communication. The discussion leads to the postulation of an intermediary level of intonational description, following the fact that intonation patterns cannot express fully specified emotive meanings in a reliable way, but rather serve as devices indicating the activation dimension of affects. The proposed level of description, considered here to be the only “semantic” property of intonation contours, would refer to the potential of individual contours to reflect given degrees of activation and be thus related to both the formal properties of intonation and the actual emotions portrayed by speakers.