The present study investigated the role of secondhand information for impression formation in spoken communication, usinga voice transfer system (DAVID). In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with spoken sentences that represented someone’s behaviorin either a positive or negative prosody, which implied his/her personality. Listeners rated each social impression of a person who tookon a specific behavior. The results showed that the formed impressions were weaker when the affective characteristics of voices wereinconsistent with those of behavioral descriptions. Experiments 2 tested the effects of speech contents on forming impressions ofspeaker’s voices using the same sound files. Results revealed that social impressions of a speaker’s voice were also modulated byspeech content, even though the content was not related to the speaker. The present study underscores the role of secondhandinformation in social impression, and advances understanding of the interaction between prosody and semantics in spokencommunication.
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