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

Abstract

Purpose: The human voice is a powerful and evolved social tool, with hundreds of studies showing that nonverbal vocal parameters robustly influence listeners' perceptions of socially meaningful speaker traits, ranging from perceived gender and age to attractiveness and trustworthiness. However, these studies have utilized a wide variety of voice stimuli to measure listeners' voice-based judgments of these traits. Here, in the largest scale study known to date, we test whether listeners judge the same unseen speakers differently depending on the complexity of the neutral speech stimulus, from single vowel sounds to a full paragraph. Method: In a playback experiment testing 2,618 listeners, we examine whether commonly studied voice-based judgments of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, femininity/masculinity, and health differ if listeners hear isolated vowels, a series of vowels, single words, single sentences (greeting), counting from 1 to 10, or a full paragraph recited aloud (Rainbow Passage), recorded from the same 208 men and women. Data were collected using a custom-designed interface in which vocalizers and traits were randomly assigned to raters. Results: Linear-mixed models show that the type of voice stimulus does indeed consistently affect listeners' judgments. Overall, ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, health, masculinity among men, and femininity among women increase as speech duration increases. At the same time, speaker-level regression analyses show that interindividual differences in perceived speaker traits are largely preserved across voice stimuli, especially among those of a similar duration. Conclusions: Socially relevant perceptions of speakers are not wholly changed but rather moderated by the length of their speech. Indeed, the same vocalizer is perceived in a similar way regardless of which neutral statements they speak, with the caveat that longer utterances explain the most shared variance in listeners' judgments and elicit the highest ratings on all traits, possibly by providing additional nonverbal information to listeners. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21158890

A model for person perception from familiar and unfamiliar voices

“…warmth/trustworthiness vs dominance 49 , 52 ), and are consistent across different types of vocal stimuli (e.g. different languages and linguistic content 53 – 55 ). While there is overall little empirical evidence that first impressions of a person are linked to their actual personality or character traits 56 , these subjective impressions can nonetheless influence our daily interactions, behaviours and decisions (e.g.…”

Comparing accuracy in voice-based assessments of biological speaker traits across speech types

“…On the other hand, if listeners’ voice-based judgments are not substantially affected by the type of speech produced by the vocaliser, this would suggest that studies using different kinds of speech may be comparable, and that any differences in their results are not likely due to the type of speech stimuli used. It would also offer further support that information encoded in the nonverbal vocal parameters of the human voice, such as in voice pitch, is relatively stable and largely impervious to changes in modal speech complexity 12 , 13 .…”

“…Likewise, many studies that test analogous research questions regarding other biological, social or affective communicative functions of the human voice use different kinds of speech stimuli, and most often only use one type of speech per study (for reviews see 1 , 2 , 6 , 38 ). In a recent paper, we showed that listener’s voice-based judgments of traits such as attractiveness, femininity and masculinity, trustworthiness, dominance and likeability can vary to some extent depending on the complexity of speech produced by the vocaliser, such that longer utterances explained the most shared variance in listeners’ judgments and elicited the highest ratings on all traits 13 . At the same time, listeners’ judgments showed a high degree of consistency across speech types within speakers, indicating that for these socially relevant traits, vocalisers were perceived largely similarly regardless of what they were saying 13 .…”

“…The present study may be the first to examine how different types of speech stimuli affect accuracy in listeners’ voice-based judgments of objective, biological speaker traits. However, previous work suggests that subjective speaker traits such as perceived attractiveness, dominance, or trustworthiness vary only slightly across speech types and thus that speakers are perceived in a similar way regardless of the complexity of their speech 13 – 15 .…”

The Time Course of Person Perception From Voices: A Behavioral Study

“…Some relevant insights with regard to these broad predictions can already be gleaned from the existing voice perception literature: Across previous studies, vocal stimuli from a wide range of durations have been sampled, from stimuli presented for less than 1 s (vowels, short words) to recordings of spoken passages of text lasting 30 s or more (cf. McAleer et al, 2014, andBayard et al, 2001; see also Groyecka-Bernard et al, 2022). Some of these studies have shown that some impressions are already formed after surprisingly little exposure: For example, rating studies show that trait impressions and socially relevant accent impressions can be established from hearing the word "hello" (~400 ms of exposure; Mahrholz et al, 2018;McAleer et al, 2014;Purnell et al, 1999) or after exposure to a single sustained vowel (Rezlescu et al, 2015).…”