Perception of threat and intent to harm from vocal and facial cues.

What constitutes a "threatening tone of voice"? There is currently little research exploring how listeners infer threat, or the intention to cause harm, from speakers' voices. Here, we investigated the influence of key linguistic variables on these evaluations (Study 1). Results showed a trend for voices perceived to be lower in pitch, particularly those of male speakers, to be evaluated as sounding more threatening and conveying greater intent to harm.

The Role of Face and Voice Cues in Predicting the Outcome of Student Representative Elections.

First impressions formed after seeing someone's face or hearing their voice can affect many social decisions, including voting in political elections. Despite the many studies investigating the independent contribution of face and voice cues to electoral success, their integration is still not well understood. Here, we examine a novel electoral context, student representative ballots, allowing us to test the generalizability of previous studies.

Audiovisual integration in social evaluation.

Our social evaluation of other people is influenced by their faces and their voices. However, rather little is known about how these channels combine in forming "first impressions." Over 5 experiments, we investigate the relative contributions of facial and vocal information for social judgments: dominance and trustworthiness.

Estimating the Relative Sociolinguistic Salience of Segmental Variables in a Dialect Boundary Zone.

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such 'top-down' associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature - the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance - can evoke multiple social category associations, depending upon the dialect in which the feature is embedded and the context in which it is heard. In a given speech community it is reasonable to expect, as a consequence of the salience of the linguistic form in question, a certain level of intersubjective agreement on social category associations.