Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Semantic And Acoustic Voice Features Differentiating Neutral And Traumatic Narratives, Yosef Shimon Amrami

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a quantitative and qualitative exploration of how one linguistically communicates emotions through an autobiographical narrative. Psycholinguistic research has affirmed that linguistic features of a narrative, including semantic and acoustic features, indicate a narrator’s emotions and physiological. This study investigated whether these linguistic features could help differentiate between trauma and neutral narratives and if they can predict autobiographical narratives’ subjective trauma ratings (STR). Qualitative analyses of the positive and negative evaluative statements were also conducted, which indicated the narrators’ thought processes during recall. Twenty-two Spanish-English college students participated in this study and narrated both traumatic and neutral narratives. …