Does Mood Induced Phonetic Variation Improve Communication?

A vast amount of evidence suggests that vocal parameters correlate with the emotional state of the speaker [5] [3] [10]. It has also been shown that positive affect in the speaker may facili-tate communicative effectiveness [7]. However, the mechanisms underlying this effect are not clear. One possibility is that positive affect increases verbal working memory capacity thereby enabling speakers to produce utterances optimised in terms of their semantic and morphosyn-tactic structure [6]. The other possibility is that phonetic features associated with positive affect facilitate speech comprehension in the listener. The present paper addresses this question. We present the results of a communication task administered to a large sample of speakers. 152 participants (native speakers of English, 88 women, 64 men, aged 16 to 42) were given a Map Task [4] which involved describing a route drawn onto a simple map. In order to receive comparable speech samples for the acoustic analysis, speakers were instructed to start off with two pre-specified lead-in sentences: "Okay, I’m now going to describe the route to you. Please draw the route exactly as I say. " After the Map Task, speakers completed the Brief Mood Introspection Scale [9]. The following measurements were obtained: 1. Communicative effectiveness was measured in terms of a hearer’s ability to follow