Abstract
Recent research on human nonverbal vocalizations has led to considerable progress in our understanding of vocal communication of emotion. However, in contrast to studies of animal vocalizations, this research has focused mainly on the emotional interpretation of such signals. The repertoire of human nonverbal vocalizations as acoustic types, and the mapping between acoustic and emotional categories, thus remain underexplored. In a cross-linguistic naming task (Experiment 1), verbal categorization of 132 authentic (non-acted) human vocalizations by English-, Swedish- and Russian-speaking participants revealed the same major acoustic types: laugh, cry, scream, moan, and possibly roar and sigh. The association between call type and perceived emotion was systematic but non-redundant: listeners associated every call type with a limited, but in some cases relatively wide, range of emotions. The speed and consistency of naming the call type predicted the speed and consistency of inferring the caller’s emotion, suggesting that acoustic and emotional categorizations are closely related. However, participants preferred to name the call type before naming the emotion. Furthermore, nonverbal categorization of the same stimuli in a triad classification task (Experiment 2) was more compatible with classification by call type than by emotion, indicating the former’s greater perceptual salience. These results suggest that acoustic categorization may precede attribution of emotion, highlighting the need to distinguish between the overt form of nonverbal signals and their interpretation by the perceiver. Both within- and between-call acoustic variation can then be modeled explicitly, bringing research on human nonverbal vocalizations more in line with the work on animal communication.
Highlights
Emotion is an essential part of being human and a matter of great theoretical and clinical significance
It is generally accepted that focal colors are universal, probably because of the physiology of human vision (Berlin and Kay 1991; Lindsey and Brown 2009). By applying this linguistic method combined with acoustic analysis to non-linguistic vocalizations, we aimed to address the first two research questions, namely to identify the most salient call types distinguished by listeners and to compare this categorization in different languages
We identified the most common name for each of 132 sounds and constructed a language-specific semantic space, in which the relative distance between any two stimuli depends on how often they were described with the same word
Summary
Emotion is an essential part of being human and a matter of great theoretical and clinical significance It has justifiably attracted a lot of attention in psychology and neuroscience, including research on facial expressions (Ekman et al 1969; Izard 1994), prosody (Banse and Scherer 1996), and non-linguistic vocalizations (Belin et al 2008; Lima et al 2013). This abiding interest in nonverbal communication has shed light on how affective states can be expressed without words; on the other hand, the most obvious level of analysis, namely the surface form of the signals themselves, has received far less attention. Is this classification justified? In what sense is laughter a call type? What other call types do humans have? A systematic analysis of these issues is the goal of this study
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