Editing Paralanguage (section)

=== Expressive aspects ===
Paralinguistic cues such as loudness, rate, pitch, pitch contour, and to some extent formant frequencies of an utterance, contribute to the emotive or attitudinal quality of an utterance.  Typically, attitudes are expressed intentionally and emotions without intention,{{citation needed|date=April 2012}} but attempts to fake or to hide emotions are not unusual.{{citation needed|date=April 2012}}
 
Consequently, paralinguistic cues relating to expression have a moderate effect of semantic marking. That is, a message may be made more or less coherent by adjusting its expressive presentation. For instance, upon hearing an utterance such as "I drink a glass of wine every night before I go to sleep" is coherent when made by a speaker identified as an adult, but registers a small semantic anomaly when made by a speaker identified as a child.<ref>Van Berkum, J. J., Van den Brink, D., Tesink, C. M., Kos, M., & Hagoort, P. (2008). The neural integration of speaker and message. ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'', 20, 580–591.</ref> This anomaly is significant enough to be measured through [[electroencephalography]], as an [[N400 (neuroscience)|N400]]. Autistic individuals have a reduced sensitivity to this and similar effects.<ref>Groen, W. B., Tesink, C., Petersson, K. M., Van Berkum, J., Van der Gaag, R. J., Hagoort, P. and Buitelaar, J. K. (2010). Semantic, factual, and social language comprehension in adolescents with autism: an fMRI study. ''Cerebral Cortex'', 20(8), 1937–1945.</ref>{{Failed verification|date=August 2021|reason=No behavioral difference was detected, relevance of study results to paralinguistics is only speculative.}}

[[Emotional tone of voice]], itself paralinguistic information, has been shown to affect the resolution of [[lexical ambiguity]]. Some words have homophonous partners; some of these homophones appear to have an implicit emotive quality, for instance, the sad "die" contrasted with the neutral "dye"; uttering the sound /dai/ in a sad tone of voice can result in a listener writing the former word significantly more often than if the word is uttered in a neutral tone.<ref>Nygaard, L. C., Lunders, E. R. (2002). [https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03194959.pdf Resolution of lexical ambiguity by emotional tone of voice]. ''Memory & Cognition'', 30(4), 583–593.</ref>