Listening between the lines: a study of paralinguistic information carried by tone-of-voice

This paper describes a study of speaking-style characteristics, or “tone-of-voice”, in conversational speech, and shows that non-verbal information is transmitted efficiently regardless of cultural and linguistic contexts through differences in prosodic and voice-quality features. We asked Korean and American listeners with no previous kowledge of Japanese to judge the meaning of various utterances of the interjection “eh” in Japanese conversations, and compared their perceptions with the acoustic characteristics of the speech. We found voicequality information to be an important discriminator.