@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2021.0691, TITLE={Role of Contextual Knowledge in Paralinguistic Affect Recognition by Humans}, AUTHOR={Andreas H. Marpaung, Avelino J. Gonzalez, }, JOURNAL={Modeling and Using Context}, VOLUME={4}, NUMBER={CONTEXT-21 Special Issue}, YEAR={2021}, URL={https://openscience.fr/Role-of-Contextual-Knowledge-in-Paralinguistic-Affect-Recognition-by-Humans}, DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2021.0691}, ISSN={2514-5711}, ABSTRACT={It has long been thought by cognitive science researchers that context plays a large role in human cognition – from memory recall to linguistics and problem solving. However, the role of context in identifying the emotional state of a human interlocutor, while thought to be important, has never been evaluated experimentally. This paper describes a study involving human test subjects that sought to gauge how well they could identify the emotion being expressed by a speaker using only paralinguistic signals (i.e., speech without understanding the spoken words), with and without knowing the speaker’s context. The first part of the study entailed asking the test subjects to identify the emotion expressed by a speaker who utters unintelligible sounds in a context-free basis. The test subjects were provided with knowledge about the context in which the speaker(s) uttered the same sounds heard before on a context-free basis. This allowed for the measurement of the impact of knowing the context upon their ability to correctly identify the expressed emotion. The results of our study indicate that knowing the context under which the speakers uttered the expressions indeed improved the ability of the test subjects to infer the correct emotion being expressed by the speakers. This paper describes the study and its results.}}