Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA.
J Voice. 2010 Mar;24(2):168-77. doi: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2008.08.002. Epub 2009 Jan 29.
Experiments to study voice quality have typically used rating scales or direct magnitude estimation to obtain listener judgments. Unfortunately, the data obtained using these tasks are context dependent, which makes it difficult to compare perceptual judgments of voice quality across experiments. The present experiment describes a simple matching task to quantify voice quality. The data obtained through this task were compared to perceptual judgments obtained using rating scale and direct magnitude estimation tasks to determine whether the three tasks provide equivalent perceptual distances across stimuli. Ten synthetic vowel continua that varied in terms of their aspiration noise were evaluated for breathiness using each of the three tasks. Linear and nonlinear regressions were used to compare the perceptual distances between stimuli obtained through each technique. Results show that the perceptual distances estimated from matching and direct magnitude estimation task are similar, but both differ from the rating scale task, suggesting that the matching task provides perceptual distances with ratio-level measurement properties. The matching task is advantageous for measurement of vocal quality because it provides reliable measurement with ratio-level scale properties. It allows the use of a fixed reference signal for all comparisons, thus allowing researchers to directly compare findings across different experiments.
研究语音质量的实验通常使用评分量表或直接量级估计来获得听众的判断。不幸的是，使用这些任务获得的数据是上下文相关的，这使得很难在实验之间比较语音质量的感知判断。本实验描述了一种用于量化语音质量的简单匹配任务。通过该任务获得的数据与使用评分量表和直接量级估计任务获得的感知判断进行了比较，以确定这三个任务是否在刺激物之间提供了等效的感知距离。使用这三个任务中的每一个任务，对十个在其吸气噪声方面变化的合成元音连续体进行了呼吸声的评估。使用线性和非线性回归来比较通过每种技术获得的刺激物之间的感知距离。结果表明，匹配和直接量级估计任务估计的感知距离相似，但两者均与评分量表任务不同，这表明匹配任务提供了具有比率级测量特性的感知距离。匹配任务有利于语音质量的测量，因为它提供了具有比率级刻度特性的可靠测量。它允许为所有比较使用固定的参考信号，从而允许研究人员在不同的实验之间直接比较结果。
