Prosodic manifestations of confidence and uncertainty in spoken language

We present a project aimed at understanding the acoustic and prosodic correlates of confidence and uncertainty in spoken language. We elicited speech produced under varying levels of certainty and performed perceptual and statistical analyses on the speech data to determine which prosodic features (e.g., pitch, energy, timing) are associated with a speaker’s level of certainty and where these prosodic manifestations occur relative to the location of the word or phrase that the speaker is confident or uncertain about. Our findings suggest that prosodic manifestations of confidence and uncertainty occur both in the local region that causes the uncertainty as well as in its surrounding context.