Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: People's estimations of how certain speakers are of their knowledge (FOAK) match speakers' own estimation (FOK) of how certain they are (Brennan & Williams, 1995).This is because others can interpret the verbal and nonverbal cues of (un)certainty that a speaker displays (Brennan & Williams, 1995;Swerts & Krahmer, 2005).Estimating another's certainty thus seems to be driven by the bottom-up processing of speaker-displayed cues.In this paper, we explore the topdown influence of beliefs about a speaker on judgments of a speaker's certainty.In a perception study, we varied whether a speaker's proclaimed profession would make him an expert or a novice on the topic he was questioned on.Such beliefs were shown to influence participants' ratings of the speaker's certainty, in addition to speaker-displayed cues.Thus, next to the bottom-up processing of speaker-displayed cues, the topdown processing of beliefs about a speaker influences judgments of others' certainty.
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2401345624