speech cues

[Robert Lawless]

A friend of my wife left a short message on our machine, "Anita, please
call me." She had an elderly husband, and by the tone of her voice I could
tell immediately that her husband had died. When my wife speaks into the
telephone, she always begins, "Hi. This is Anita." I can tell with 100
percent accuracy from those four words whether she is talking to the person
or to a machine. We can all tell the difference between a person reading
text and speaking extemporaneously, though with practice one can
successfully deceive; Ronald Reagan could read a text and sounds as though
he were speaking extemporaneously. (Dan Quail could speak extemporaneously
and sound as though he were reading a text.) I had a friend in high school
who was dumb as a post but he made straight A's in physics, the hardest
course in the high school. The physics teacher gave multiple-choice exams
orally, and my friend could tell with 95 percent accuracy which spoken
alternative was correct. What sort of work have linguists done in these
areas? Robert.
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