Talk:Emotional prosody

{{FailedGA|12:22, 13 May 2012 (UTC)|page=1|topic=Social sciences and society|o

Patent nonsense?[edit]

This article makes several unsubstantiated and nonsensical claims (though whether the nonsense is patent may depend on the reader's knowledge). From the lead, the very first two sentences run thus:

Emotional prosody is characterized as an individual's tone of voice in speech that is conveyed through changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses which is different from linguistic and semantic information. It can be isolated from linguistics and interacts with verbal content (e.g. sarcasm).

It is nonsense to say that changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses are different from linguistic and semantic information, since

these are all items of linguistic information, more specifically, of acoustic linguistic information, and
the phrase linguistic and semantic information suggests, wrongly, that semantic information might be distinct from linguistic information, even though semantics is a part of linguistics.

Other defects:

The passage I've cited also suffers from passive voice, and would be more informative if recast in the active.
Also, emotional prosody affects much more than just tone of voice, which is only one aspect of the three T's - tonality, tonicity and tone – of prosodic intonation – see prosody (linguistics) § Intonation.
Interaction of emotional prosody with verbal content also needs some clarification, perhaps by expanding the examples.

Accordingly, I suggest the following rewrite of those two sentences, pending improvements by the original authors that effectively address these concerns:

Emotional prosody describes how an individual's manner of speech conveys emotion, using acoustic cues such as changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses. Prosody interacts with verbal content to convey various emotions and intents, such as excitement, concern, anger and sarcasm.

Altho' I want to be bold and just make this edit, I'd like first to canvass opinion. If you can, please respond here. yoyo (talk) 00:58, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Further to the issue of interaction of emotional prosody with verbal content, I note that the article as reviewed in 2012 included another section – Speech acoustics – that discusses relevant aspects of the source-filter theory of speech production, including the example of a sentence spoken while smiling or frowning. In that context, it would be easier to understand the example of sarcasm given in the lead. I don't know why that section has since been removed, as it seems pertinent.

Earlier today, I wrote that I'd like "to canvass opinion", then discovered later that canvassing is a dirty word on Wikipedia, according to some Humpty Dumpties, whereas it's a perfectly neutral word in ordinary English and I make no apologies for continuing to use it so. Since I've identified just two editors who were involved in the 2012 review, I'll start by inviting both: @Jezhotwells and Bilby: please comment if you can. All others, naturally, are also welcome to chip in. yoyo (talk) 04:51, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

May I make a minor correction to the above? The term 'tone of voice' is not one of the so-called "Three T's" (tonality, tonicity and tone), where tone refers exclusively to pitch movement or level. The term "tone of voice" is in fact a very ill-defined "catch-all" term that is often used but rarely given any technical meaning. I should add that I have serious reservations about this whole article. RoachPeter (talk) 11:50, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment[edit]

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Gustavus Adolphus College supported by WikiProject Psychology and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2012 Q1 term. Further details are available on the course page.