Extra-Speech Information

Aspects of spoken language beyond the words themselves that convey additional meaning, including how something is said rather than what is said. Examples include tone of voice (yelling, whispering), vocal emotion (sarcasm, anger, joy), singing, the language being spoken, speaker identity, and contextual vocal expressions like coughing or sighing. Extra-speech information is a subset of non-speech information in captioning and is often poorly communicated in closed captions, despite playing a crucial role in narrative comprehension and emotional connection to media content. Conveying ESI effectively in captions may involve typographic choices, punctuation, text formatting, or supplementary visual cues.