15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

On the Impact of Emotive Content on Tactile Word Perception

Thomas Arnhold (1), Hans Georg Piroth (2)

(1) University of Munich, Germany
(2) Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany

An experiment on tactile speech communication systems for the deaf was carried out to test the impact of strong words with sexual content in contrast to emotional neutral words on semantic processing and psychophysiological reactions. Four wordforms were tactually presented in an identification test using (i) an articulatory coding and (ii) a non-phonetic arbitrary coding. Response behavior, skin conductance reactions (SCR), eyeblinks and response time were measured. An increase of blinking latencies indicated difficulties in the identification of the non-phonetic coding. SCRs were higher for phonetically coded stimuli, but did not increase with the emotive load of the word meanings.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Arnhold, Thomas / Piroth, Hans Georg (2003): "On the impact of emotive content on tactile word perception", In ICPhS-15, 1481-1484.