10:00 AM MYT
Depending on the intensity, tone and rate of someone s speech, the brain apparently recognises whether the message would tend to be true or not. Photo: AFP
It s possible to spot a liar just from their voice, research suggests. In fact, the pitch, rate and intensity of someone s speech can help us deduce whether a speaker is honest and sure of what they re saying, or whether they re lying, according to a study from the French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS.
The research was carried out by scientists at the Science and Technology for Music and Sound Laboratory and the Perceptual Systems Laboratory. The study was published in the journal
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Faster speech rate, greater intensity in the middle of the word, and falling pitch at the end of the word: that is the prosody[1] to adopt if one wants to come across as reliable and honest to one s listeners. Scientists from the Science and Technology for Music and Sound laboratory (CNRS/Ircam/Sorbonne Université/Ministère de la Culture)[2] and the Perceptual Systems Laboratory (CNRS/ENS PSL) have conducted a series of experiments[3] to understand how we decide, based on the voice, whether a speaker is honest and confident, or on the contrary dishonest and uncertain. They have also shown that this signature was perceived similarly in a number of languages (French, English, Spanish), and that it is registered automatically by the brain: even when participants were not judging the speaker s certainty or honesty, this characteristic sound impacted how they memorized the words. Prosody consequently conveys information on the truth-value or certainty of a proposition. Scien