Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Chills Beyond Music: How Speech Elicits Skin Conductance Responses
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Lukas Nemestothy1,2, Susanne Maria Reiterer1,3; 1Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 2Vienna Doctoral School Cognition Behaviour and Neuroscience, Vienna, Austria, 3Vienna Cognitive Science Hub, Vienna, Austria
Chills are brief, often pleasurable bodily sensations that are commonly associated with music and are usually accompanied by skin conductance responses, which are regarded as a neurophysiological marker of aesthetic processing. This adds a measurable physiological component to the often behaviorally assessed phenomenon. While music-elicited chills have been studied thoroughly, much less is known about whether spoken language can produce comparable responses. Several accounts propose shared evolutionary, affective, and neurocognitive mechanisms for music and speech, including the musical protolanguage theory and the musi-linguistic continuum. Building on the concept of phonetic chills, the present study examined whether non-melodic speech could elicit physiological chill responses, and whether such responses align with behavioral reports of chills. Seventy-eight participants (N = 78) listened to 16 auditory stimuli and provided continuous self-reports and retrospective chill ratings. The experiment took place under controlled laboratory conditions. Electrodermal activity was recorded from electrodes placed on the distal phalanges of the index and middle fingers of the left hand. Recordings were obtained using a g.HIamp biosignal amplifier at 256 Hz, alongside pulse, plethysmogram, and SpO₂ measures. Preprocessing and feature extraction were conducted in Python using open-source tools including NeuroKit2, EDA-Explorer, NumPy, SciPy, and pandas. To harmonize artifact detection and phasic decomposition, EDA signals were downsampled to 8 Hz. Motion artifacts were identified using the MIT Media Lab EDA-Explorer pipeline and interpolated where detected. Cleaned signals were low-pass filtered and decomposed into tonic and phasic components using cvxEDA as implemented in NeuroKit2. Event-related analyses were aligned to stimulus onset triggers. Because SCRs have a delayed latency, responses within the first 4s were treated as orienting responses, while later SCRs were interpreted as stimulus-related chill responses. The results provide evidence that spoken language can reliably elicit physiological chill responses. Speech stimuli produced significant SCR peak responses, supporting the hypothesis that non-melodic language can move listeners physiologically. However, physiological and subjective indices dissociated: although SCR peaks occurred frequently, participants did not consistently report these experiences as chills. Comparisons between speech and music showed that the occurrence of physiological chills did not differ reliably between the two stimulus types. However, when physiological chills occurred, music elicited stronger responses than speech, as reflected in higher SCR peak counts. At the same time, substantial interindividual variability was observed, consistent with previous evidence that only a subset of listeners reliably experiences chills. These findings suggest that spoken language can elicit bodily responses comparable in occurrence, though not intensity, to those elicited during music listening. Importantly, the dissociation between physiological and subjective measures indicates that language may affect listeners at a physiological level even when they do not consciously label the experience as a chill. This has implications for the study of affective speech perception, aesthetic language experience, and the shared neurobiological mechanisms underlying music and language. The results support the view that aesthetic responses to language are not limited to semantic or literary meaning but may also emerge from the perceptual and affective qualities of speech sound itself.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,