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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
The sound of motion in spoken language: visual information conveyed by acoustic properties of speech
Hadas Shintel1, Howard C Nusbaum
1Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, The University of Chicago, Beecher 102, 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. hadas@uchicago.edu
Abstract:
Language is generally viewed as conveying information through symbols whose form is arbitrarily related to their meaning. This arbitrary relation is often assumed to also characterize the mental representations underlying language comprehension. We explore the idea that visuo-spatial information can be analogically conveyed through acoustic properties of speech and that such information is integrated into an analog perceptual representation as a natural part of comprehension. Listeners heard sentences describing objects, spoken at varying speaking rates. After each sentence, participants saw a picture of an object and judged whether it had been mentioned in the sentence. Participants were faster to recognize the object when motion implied by speaking rate matched the motion implied by the picture. Results suggest that visuo-spatial referential information can be analogically conveyed and represented.
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