Production of intoxication states by actors: Perception by lay listeners

The effects of ingesting ethanol have been shown to be somewhat variable in humans; there appear to be but few universals. Yet, questions about intoxi cation often are asked by law enforcement personnel (especially relative to DUI), clinicians and various individuals in social settings. A key questio n: Is it possible to determine if a person is intoxicated by observing them in some manner? A closely associated one: Can speech be used for that purp ose? Two of the many issues related to the second of these questions involv e the possibility that(1) speakers, especially actors, can effectively mimi c the speech of intoxicated individuals, and (2) they may be able to voliti onally reduce any speech degradation which results from intoxication. The a pproach used to test these two questions tasked auditors to determine if th ese simulations were possible. To this end, young, healthy actors chosen on the basis of a large number of selection criteria were asked to produce se veral types of controlled utterances (1) during a learning phase, (2) when sober, (3) at three simulated levels of intoxication (mildly, legally and s everely drunk), (4) during actual, and parallel, levels of intoxication, an d (5) at the highest intoxication level attained but when attempting to sou nd completely sober. Two aural-perceptual studies were conducted; both invo lved counterbalanced ABX procedures where each subject was paired with him/ herself. Listeners were normally hearing university students drawn from und ergraduate phonetics and linguistics courses. In the first study, they rate d the actors as being more intoxicated-when they actually were sober but si mulating drunkenness-88% more often than when they actually were intoxicate d. In the second study, they were judged as sounding less inebriated when a ttempting to sound sober (than they actually were) 61% of the time. These r elationships would appear to impact a number of situations; one of special importance would be the detection of intoxication in motorists.