Paralanguage refers to the non-verbal elements of communication used to modify meaning and convey emotion. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously, and it includes the pitch, volume, and, in some cases, intonation of speech. Sometimes the definition is restricted to vocally-produced sounds. The study is known as paralinguistics.

The term 'paralanguage' should not be confused with kinesics, or the study of body language. While kinesics is non-linguistic, it is not necessarily related to vocal or written language: paralanguage is. Paralinguistic information, because it is phenomenal, belongs to the external speech signal(Ferdinand de Saussure's parole) but not to the arbitrary conventional code of language (Saussure's langue).

The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human speech communication. There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated. This voice must have some properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are paralinguistic. However, the distinction linguistic vs. paralinguistic applies not only to speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory modality. Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties that can be seen (lip reading, McGurk effect), and even felt, e.g. by the Tadoma method.

Aspects of the speech signal [link]

Perspectival aspects

Speech signals that arrive at a listener’s ears have acoustic properties that may allow listeners to localize the speaker (distance, direction). Sound localization functions in a similar way also for non-speech sounds. The perspectival aspects of lip reading are more obvious and have more drastic effects when head turning is involved.

Organic aspects

The speech organs of different speakers differ in size. As children grow up, their organs of speech become larger and there are differences between male and female adults. The differences concern not only size, but also proportions. They affect the pitch of the voice and to a substantial extent also the formant frequencies, which characterize the different speech sounds. The organic quality of speech has a communicative function in a restricted sense, since it is merely informative about the speaker. It will be expressed independently of the speaker’s intention.

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]}, but attempts to fake or to hide emotions are not unusual^{[citation needed]}.

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 ^[1]. This anomaly is significant enough to be measured through electroencephalography, as an N400. Individuals with disorders along autism spectrum have a reduced sensitivity to this and similar effects ^[2].

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 that word significantly more often than if the word is uttered in a neutral tone ^[3].

Linguistic aspects

Ordinary phonetic transcriptions of utterances reflect only the linguistically informative quality. The problem of how listeners factor out the linguistically informative quality from speech signals is a topic of current research.

Some of the linguistic features of speech, in particular of its prosody, are paralinguistic or pre-linguistic in origin. A most fundamental and widespread phenomenon of this kind is described by John Ohala as the "frequency code" ^[4]. This code works even in communication across species. It has its origin in the fact that the acoustic frequencies in the voice of small vocalizers are high while they are low in the voice of large vocalizers. This gives rise to secondary meanings such as 'harmless', 'submissive', 'unassertive', which are naturally associated with smallness, while meanings such as 'dangerous', 'dominant', and 'assertive' are associated with largeness. In most languages, the frequency code also serves the purpose of distinguishing questions from statements. It is universally reflected in expressive variation, and it is reasonable to assume that it has phylogenetically given rise to the sexual dimorphism that lies behind the large difference in pitch between average female and male adults.

In text-only communication such as email, chatrooms and instant messaging, paralinguistic elements can be displayed by emoticons, font and color choices, capitalization and the use of non-alphabetic or abstract characters. Nonetheless, paralanguage in written communication is limited in comparison with face-to-face conversation, sometimes leading to misunderstandings.

Physiology of paralinguistic comprehension [link]

fMRI studies

Several studies have used the fMRI paradigm to observe brain states brought about by adjustments of paralinguistic information. One such study investigated the effect of interjections that differed along the criteria of lexical index (more or less "wordy") as well as neutral or emotional pronunciation; a higher hemodynamic response in auditory cortical gyri was found when more robust paralinguistic data was available. Some activation was found in lower brain structures such as the pons, perhaps indicating an emotional response ^[5].

See also [link]

• Body language
• Kinesics, Proxemics
• Metacommunicative competence
• Intercultural competence

Further reading [link]

• Robbins, S. and Langton, N. (2001) Organizational Behaviour: Concepts, Controversies, Applications (2nd Canadian ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall
• Traunmüller, H. (2005) "Paralinguale Phänomene" (Paralinguistic phenomena), chapter 76 in: SOCIOLINGUISTICS An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, 2nd ed., U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier, P. Trudgill (eds.), Vol. 1, pp 653-665. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.
• Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, Patrick Fanning [1983] (1995) Messages: The Communication Skills Book, Second Edition, New Harbinger Publications, ISBN 1-57224-592-1, ISBN 978-1-57224-592-1, pp. 63-67

References [link]