Do Voice-Based Judgments of Socially Relevant Speaker Traits Differ Across Speech Types?

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Acoustic Phonetics
• Speech Science

Background:

• The human voice is a crucial social tool, with vocal parameters influencing perceptions of speaker traits.
• Previous research used diverse voice stimuli, limiting comparability of listener judgments.
• The impact of speech stimulus complexity on voice perception remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if listeners' judgments of speaker traits differ based on the complexity of neutral speech stimuli.
• To determine the effect of varying speech durations, from vowels to paragraphs, on voice-based perceptions.
• To conduct the largest-scale study to date on this topic.

Main Methods:

• A playback experiment involving 2,618 listeners evaluating 208 speakers.
• Listeners judged traits (attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, gender, health) based on stimuli ranging from isolated vowels to a full paragraph (Rainbow Passage).
• Data collected via a custom interface with randomized assignment of vocalizers and traits to raters.

Main Results:

• Speech stimulus type consistently affected listener judgments.
• Ratings for attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, health, and gender-specific traits increased with speech duration.
• Interindividual differences in perceived traits were largely preserved across stimuli of similar duration.

Conclusions:

• Speech duration moderates, rather than wholly changes, socially relevant speaker perceptions.
• Longer speech utterances explain more shared variance in listener judgments and elicit higher trait ratings.
• Additional nonverbal information in longer speech may enhance listener perception and judgment consistency.