Roche Jennifer M, Asaro Katie, Morris Bradley J, Morgan Shae D
Educational Psychology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, United States.
Speech Pathology & Audiology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, United States.
Front Psychol. 2023 Dec 14;14:1125164. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1125164. eCollection 2023.
Socio-indexical cues to gender and vocal affect often interact and sometimes lead listeners to make differential judgements of affective intent based on the gender of the speaker. Previous research suggests that rising intonation is a common cue that both women and men produce to communicate lack of confidence, but listeners are more sensitive to this cue when it is produced by women. Some speech perception theories assume that listeners will track conditional statistics of speech and language cues (e.g., frequency of the socio-indexical cues to gender and affect) in their listening and communication environments during speech perception. It is currently less clear if these conditional statistics will impact listener ratings when context varies (e.g., number of talkers).
To test this, we presented listeners with vocal utterances from one female and one male-pitched voice (single talker condition) or many female/male-pitched voices (4 female voices; 4 female voices pitch-shifted to a male range) to examine how they impacted perceptions of talker confidence.
Results indicated that when one voice was evaluated, listeners defaulted to the gender stereotype that the female voice using rising intonation (a cue to lack of confidence) was less confident than the male-pitched voice (using the same cue). However, in the multi-talker condition, this effect went away and listeners equally rated the confidence of the female and male-pitched voices.
Findings support dual process theories of information processing, such that listeners may rely on heuristics when speech perception is devoid of context, but when there are no differentiating qualities across talkers (regardless of gender), listeners may be ideal adapters who focus on only the relevant cues.
社会索引线索与性别及语音情感常常相互作用，有时会使听众根据说话者的性别对情感意图做出不同判断。先前的研究表明，语调上升是女性和男性用来传达缺乏自信的常见线索，但当女性发出此线索时，听众对此更为敏感。一些言语感知理论认为，听众在言语感知过程中会追踪其倾听和交流环境中言语和语言线索的条件统计信息（例如，社会索引线索对性别和情感的频率）。目前尚不清楚当语境变化时（例如，说话者数量），这些条件统计信息是否会影响听众的评分。
为了对此进行测试，我们向听众呈现了一个女性和一个男性音高的声音（单说话者条件）或多个女性/男性音高的声音（4个女性声音；4个女性声音移调到男性音高范围）的发声，以研究它们如何影响对说话者自信的感知。
结果表明，当评估一个声音时，听众默认性别刻板印象，即使用语调上升（缺乏自信的线索）的女性声音比男性音高的声音（使用相同线索）更缺乏自信。然而，在多说话者条件下，这种效应消失了，听众对女性和男性音高声音的自信评分相同。
研究结果支持信息处理的双过程理论，即当言语感知缺乏语境时，听众可能依赖启发式方法，但当说话者之间没有区分特征时（无论性别），听众可能是理想的适应者，只关注相关线索。
