CogNovo research fellow Ilaria Torre presented a poster entitled "Behavioural mediation of prosodic cues to implicit judgements of trustworthiness" at the conference Speech Prosody 8 in Boston. Her presentation was based on a paper written with Laurence White and Jeremy Goslin and the proceeding are already available for download at the conference website. The paper "Behavioural mediation of prosodic cues to implicit judgements of trustworthiness" is part of the research Ilaria is doing for her PhD project "Creating a voice for engagement and trust". In the presented research she used the Investment Game to test implicit judgements of trustworthiness to different speakers of different accents. By using more than one speaker of the same accent, she was able to assess the hypothesis that various inter-speakers differences (such as pitch, pitch range, speech rate or voice quality) influence listener's trustworthiness attributions (hear examples at the supplemental material to the poster presentation). In this way, she also fit in the main theme of the conference, namely "Prosody and the Individual: Unity and Difference Within and Across Speech Communities".
Ilaria attended the 8th Speech Prosody conference, which took place in Boston, MA, from the 31st May to the 3rd June 2016. Speech Prosody is a biennial conference gathering people working in the fields of linguistics, acoustics, speech synthesis and recognition, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, speech therapy and language teaching, among others. It is a Special Interest Group of the International Speech Communication Association, which provided one of the awards recently won by Ilaria, to pay for the conference registration.
Additionally, the organizers made available all the videos of the talks presented at the conference; these will be free to stream and download for anyone who attended the conference, while the public will be able to access them for a small fee.