Ponsot et al. use an ingenious method to determine prosodic prototypes that govern social judgments in speech. Clips from their introduction:
In social encounters with strangers, human beings are able to form high-level social representations from very thin slices of expressive behavior and quickly determine whether the other is a friend or a foe and whether they have the ability to enact their good or bad intentions. While much is already known about how facial features contribute to such evaluations, determinants of social judgments in the auditory modality remain poorly understood.
Anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists have noted regularities of ...
