Social appropriateness perception of dynamic interactions

ABSTRACT

The current study explored the judgment of communicative appropriateness while processing a dialogue between two individuals. All stimuli were presented as audio-visual as well as audio-only vignettes and 24 young adults reported their social impression (appropriateness) of literal, blunt, sarcastic, and teasing statements. On average, teasing statements were rated as more appropriate when processing audio-visual statements compared to the audio-only version of a stimuli, while sarcastic statements were judged as less appropriate with additional visual information. These results indicate a rejection of the Tinge Hypothesis for audio-visual vignettes while confirming it for the reduced, audio-only counterparts. We also analyzed time-frequency EEG data of four frequency bands that have been related to language processing: alpha, beta, theta and low gamma. We found desynchronization in the alpha band literal versus nonliteral items, confirming the assumption that the alpha band reflects stimulus complexity. The analysis also revealed a power increase in the theta, beta and low gamma band, especially when comparing blunt and nonliteral statements in the audio-only condition. The time-frequency results corroborate the prominent role of the alpha and theta bands in language processing and offer new insights into the neural correlates of communicative appropriateness and social aspects of speech perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Appropriateness
• brain oscillations
• nonliteral language
• audio-visual processing
• pragmatics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under grant #RGPIN-2016-04373 (“Neurocognitive studies of vocal emotions in speech”) to M.D. Pell.