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Record W4412546541 · doi:10.3389/fcomm.2025.1592994

The sound of complaints

2025· article· en· W4412546541 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Maël Mauchand, Marc D. Pell

Bibliographic record

VenueFrontiers in Communication · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLanguage, Discourse, Communication Strategies
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersFonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologiesFaculty of Medicine, McGill UniversitySocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaMcGill University
KeywordsSound (geography)ChemistryAcousticsPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Complaining is a social act in which a speaker often verbally conveys feelings of suffering to gain empathy from listeners. The present study investigated the acoustic profile of complaints to identify which prosodic features are used in this context and to explore differences in their cultural expression in two variants of French. A stimulus set composed of 336 complaints and 336 prosodically neutral utterances produced by two cultural groups, French and Québécois (French-Canadian), was analyzed along 15 acoustic parameters. Utterances were also judged by listeners to determine whether complaints were perceptually associated with particular emotional characteristics. Relative to neutral statements, complaints displayed increases in fundamental frequency (mean, variability, and range), loudness, and high-frequency energy, and several rhythmic modulations. Complaints were also characterized by systematic changes in parameters related to voice quality and increased vocal control (decreased shimmer, increased harmonics-to-noise ratio), which could exemplify the speaker’s strategic use of emotive cues. Perceptually, complaining voices were most associated with sadness, anger, and surprise. Complaints produced by French and Québécois speakers demonstrated shared central tendencies but also differed both acoustically and perceptually. Our results provide new insights into the acoustic and perceptual profiles of emotive “complaining” speech patterns meant to elicit empathy in social interactions.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.014

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.291
Teacher spread0.263 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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