
Melina SarianUniversity of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Anthropology
Melina Sarian
Bachelor of Arts
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Publications (5)
The evolution of deception is a major question in the science of human origins. Several hypotheses have been proposed for its evolution. As part of a suite of cognitive traits, these explanations are often packaged under either the Social Brain Hypothesis, which seeks to explain the current adaptive use of this suite of cognitive traits in human so...
This study tests whether individuals vocally align toward emotionally expressive prosody produced by two types of interlocutors: a human and a voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) assistant. Participants completed a word shadowing experiment of interjections (e.g., “Awesome”) produced in emotionally neutral and expressive prosodies b...
The human practice of adorning the body, either through clothing, use of pigments, jewelry, or other decorative materials, appears to be a cross-cultural universal (Antweiler, 2016; Brown, 1991; Murdock, 1945). Noting that a behavior is universal, however, does not necessarily aid us in understanding the causal reasons for its enactment, or the bro...
This paper investigates users’ speech rate adjustments during conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot in response to situational (in-lab vs. at-home) and communicative (ASR comprehension errors) factors. We collected user interaction studies and measured speech rate at each turn in the conversation and in baseline productions (collected prior...
More and more, humans are engaging with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems that have names (e.g., Alexa), apparent genders, and even emotional expression; they are in many ways a growing 'social' presence. But to what extent do people display sociolinguistic attitudes, developed from human-human interaction, toward these di...