Prosodic Facilitation and Interference while Judging on the Veracity of Synthesized Statements

STEFAN BENUS; GRAVANO, AGUSTÍN; MARIAN TRNKA; GÁLVEZ, RAMIRO H.

Estocolmo

Conferencia; Interspeech 2017; 2017

International Speech Communication Association

Two primary sources of information are provided in humanspeech. On the one hand, the verbal channel encodes linguis-tic content, while on the other hand, the vocal channel transmitsparalinguistic information, mainly through prosody. In line withseveral studies that induce a conflict between these two chan-nels to better understand the role of prosody, we conducted anexperiment in which subjects had to listen to a series of state-ments synthesized with varying prosody and indicate if they be-lieved them to be true or false. We find evidence suggestingthat acoustic/prosodic (a/p) features of the synthesized state-ments affect response times (a well-known proxy for cognitiveload). Our results suggest that prosody in synthesized speechmay play a role of either facilitation or interference when sub-jects judge the truthfulness of a statement. Furthermore, we findthat this pattern is amplified when the a/p features of the syn-thesized statements are analyzed relative to the subjects? owna/p features. This suggests that the entrainment of TTS voiceshas serious implications in the perceived trustworthiness of thesystem?s skills.