Study: It's not just what you say, but how you say it

July 21, 2006

BY KENDRICK MARSHALL Staff Reporter

White Sox broadcaster Ken "Hawk" Harrelson frequently shouts out, "He gone!" to emphasize a dramatic strikeout.

Like Harrelson, says a recent University of Chicago study, most people instinctively raise and lower the tone of their voices in spontaneous outbursts about what they see -- an acoustic dimension.

Scientists generally thought of speech as conveying information in only two ways -- through the speaker's words and sentences and through visible shows of emotion and attitude.

However, researchers found there is a third channel. Speakers express meaning through what is called the acoustic dimension -- or how words sound instead of what they mean.

The U. of C. scientists studied circumstances under which people change the pitch of their voices and concluded that speakers naturally have outbursts when talking, even when there is no intent to dramatize a description of an event. An example would be a person who raises the pitch of the voice when a flag is raised on a flagpole and lowers pitch as the flag goes down.

No link to hand gestures

Researchers said the results show that speakers unintentionally convey information about events or objects when talking -- the pitch is higher when the speaker feels the subject is more significant and lower with lower significance.

"The way the word sounds or how the event is described is more important to the listener than the word alone," said Howard C. Nusbaum, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

For an example, Nusbaum instructed five subjects to describe a moving animated dot using the sentences, "It is going left," or, "It is going right." As the dot moved at various speeds, pitch changed as the speaker kept up with the motion. Also, it increased when the dot moved up and decreased when the dot moved down. Researchers found no correlation between pitch changes and the use of hands.

kmarshall@suntimes.com