Classification of auditory-visual attitudes in German

This paper presents results from an auditory-visual recognition experiment employing short utterances of German produced with varying attitudinal expressions. It is based on 16 different kinds of social and/or propositional attitudes which place speakers in various social interactions with a partner of inferior, equal or superior status, and having a communication aim with a positive, neutral or negative, valence. Data from ten German subjects were classified by native perceivers regarding the attitude portrayed. Participants were given five choices: The intended attitude, two closely related attitudes, and two randomly chosen ones. Higher recognition scores were obtained in audio-visual presentations (45%), over 36% with audio-only stimuli. The best recognized attitudes were doubt, (neutral) statement, surprise and irritation which all yielded audio-visual recognition scores over 50%. Lowest recognition scores were obtained for irony, ‘walking-on-eggs’ and politeness. A hierarchical clustering based on correspondence analysis showed that groupings of stimuli in one cluster are consistent with their original labels these consistent stimuli yield better recognition scores. Conversely, clusters with heterogeneous populations simply aggregate bad performances.