Production of Nonverbal Acoustic Signals and Resulting Physiological Responses

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Saint Etienne2,000 enrolled

Overview

Like many other animals, humans produce nonverbal vocal signals including screams, grunts, roars, cries and laughter across a variety of contexts. However, despite their importance in the human vocal repertoire, the mechanisms and functions of non-verbal signals remain little studied and poorly understood in humans.Our studies aim to improve our understanding of the nature and function of non-verbal signals.

Like many other animals, humans produce nonverbal vocal signals including screams, grunts, roars, cries and laughter across a variety of contexts. Many of these signals (such as cries) are already produced at birth and likely serve a number of important biological and social functions. In addition, human speech is characterised by nonlinguistic acoustic parameters (such as pitch, formant frequencies, and nonlinear phenomena) that are known to correlate with biologically important traits of the vocalizer. However, despite their importance in the human vocal repertoire, the mechanisms and functions of non-verbal signals remain little studied and poorly understood in humans. Theses studies aim to improve the understanding of the nature and function of non-verbal signals. Thus, this study is part of a long-term research project in which investigators are trying to clarify the information contained in the acoustic structure of human non-verbal signals, and to investigate the factors influencing their production.

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

2,000

Conditions

Self-Perception

Interventions

Production of vocal soundsBEHAVIORAL

Participants will be asked to produce vocal sounds of different nature according to the non-verbal parameters of interest for the given study. For example, they can read a script containing vowels ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'), short sentences ('hello, how are you'), longer passages of standardised reading texts, and can also be asked to speak freely about any topic ('freedom of speech'). They can be asked to play a role or to imitate a particular emotional state. For example, "imagine that you have just been told that you have won a million euros in the lottery. Produce a vocalisation to express your excitement" or "talk to your dog your dog by imagining that he has done a negative action and then do the same thing by imagining that this time imagining that the action was positive".

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 80 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: \- Participant should be affiliated or entitled to a social security scheme Exclusion Criteria: * Pregnant women * Voice production disorders * Hearing impairment, speech production disorders or major health problems. * Chronic smoker (more than 10 cigarettes per day)

Locations (1)

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Saint-Etienne

Saint-Etienne, France

RECRUITING

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Vocal analysis

Participants will receive instructions on what to say or what type of non-verbal vocalisation to produce during the manipulation. The vocalisations thus produced by the participants will be systematically recorded and analysed using software adapted to acoustic analysis Measurement of acoustic variables such as fundamental frequency (pitch), vocal tract resonances (formants) and vocal disturbances (jitter, shimmer), the nonlinearities and chaotic/noise properties of vocalisations