Abstract
Indirect forms of speech, such as sarcasm, jocularity (joking), and ‘white lies’ told to spare another’s feelings, occur frequently in daily life and are a problem for many clinical populations. During social interactions, information about the literal or nonliteral meaning of a speaker unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels (e.g., linguistic, facial, vocal, and body cues); however, to date many studies have employed uni-modal stimuli, for example focusing only on the visual modality, limiting the generalizability of these results to everyday communication. Much of this research also neglects key factors for interpreting speaker intentions, such as verbal context and the relationship of social partners. Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is a newly developed (English-language) database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social relationship between communication partners (e.g., boss/employee, couple) and the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations, physical objects) while controlling for major differences in the linguistic content of matched items. Here, we present initial perceptual validation data (N = 31) on a corpus of 920 items. Overall accuracy for identifying speaker intentions was above 80 % correct and our results show that both relationship type and verbal context influence the categorization of literal and nonliteral interactions, underscoring the importance of these factors in research on speaker intentions. We believe that RISC will prove highly constructive as a tool in future research on social cognition, inter-personal communication, and the interpretation of speaker intentions in both healthy adults and clinical populations.
Highlights
Social dimensions of interpersonal communication have received more and more attention within the last decade, partly due to the rise of social neuroscience [1,2] and the trend to consider pragmatic aspects of language [3]
Here we introduce the development of a new database of short videotaped vignettes—the Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) inventory—which encodes four types of speaker intentions (sincerity, irony, sarcasm, white lies) while defining the relationship of communication partners and the availability of discourse context
Items that yielded an incorrect response on the content question were excluded from analyses of how speaker intentions were understood to eliminate any responses that could be the result of guessing or inattention
Summary
Social dimensions of interpersonal communication have received more and more attention within the last decade, partly due to the rise of social neuroscience [1,2] and the trend to consider pragmatic aspects of language [3]. The meanings encoded by language are often a central feature of social interactions [4,5], most of our interactions are not entirely literal and require some sort of inference-making ability because what is said and what is understood are PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133902. The meanings encoded by language are often a central feature of social interactions [4,5], most of our interactions are not entirely literal and require some sort of inference-making ability because what is said and what is understood are PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133902 July 30, 2015
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