ISLAMABAD - Faster speech rate, greater intensity in the middle of the word, and falling pitch at the end of the word: that is the prosody to adopt if one wants to come across as reliable and honest to one’s listeners.Scientists from the Science and Technology for Music and Sound laboratory (CNRS/Ircam/Sorbonne Université/Ministère de la Culture)and the Perceptual Systems Laboratory (CNRS/ENS PSL) have conducted a series of experiments to understand how we decide, based on the voice, whether a speaker is honest and confident, or on the contrary dishonest and uncertain.

They have also shown that this signature was perceived similarly in a number of languages (French, English, Spanish), and that it is registered “automatically” by the brain: even when participants were not judging the speaker’s certainty or honesty, this characteristic sound impacted how they memorized the words.Prosody consequently conveys information on the truth-value or certainty of a proposition. Scientists are now trying to understand how speakers produce such prosody based on their intentions. This research was published recently in Nature Communications.