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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Listener experience and perception of voice quality
J Kreiman1, B R Gerratt, K Precoda
1VA Medical Center, West Los Angeles.
Summary
Expert and naive listeners perceive voice quality differently. Clinical experience influences how speech-language clinicians judge voice similarity, highlighting the need for individualized analysis over averaged data.
Area of Science:
- Speech-language pathology
- Acoustic phonetics
- Psychoacoustics
Background:
- Understanding voice quality perception is crucial for diagnosing and treating voice disorders.
- Previous research suggests listener expertise may influence voice perception, but specific perceptual strategies remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how speech-language clinicians and naive listeners perceptually rate voice similarity.
- To determine if clinical experience alters the perceptual strategies used to evaluate normal and dysphonic voices.
Main Methods:
- A multidimensional scaling approach was employed to analyze similarity ratings of normal and dysphonic voice pairs.
- Five speech-language clinicians and five naive listeners participated in the perceptual rating task.
- Comparison of solution spaces identified key perceptual parameters for each listener group.
Main Results:
- Naive listeners consistently utilized similar perceptual strategies for judging voice similarity.
- Speech-language clinicians exhibited significant individual variability in the voice characteristics they prioritized.
- Both naive and expert listeners attended to different acoustic features when evaluating normal versus pathological voices.
Conclusions:
- Clinical experience shapes distinct perceptual strategies for voice quality assessment.
- Averaging perceptual data across clinicians may obscure crucial individual differences in voice evaluation.
- Individualized analysis of perceptual data is recommended for accurate voice disorder assessment.
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