Auditory First Impressions
Who sounds similar? Group these speakers by whatever stands out to you about their voices or way of talking.
In this study, listeners clicked on squares in a PowerPoint slide to hear a different person reading a couple sentences. They then arranged the speakers into groups that sounded similar to them. Unknown to them, many of the speakers were born deaf and had used cochlear implants since childhood, which can make their speech hard to understand or give them an "accent" of sorts. In past studies in a larger project about Impressions of Cochlear Implant User Speech, listeners' first impressions of CI users were less positive than those of people with typical hearing (TH), even when every word is intelligible. What do listeners pick up on that makes even perfectly intelligible speakers sound different to them? Some of the most commonly-measured features that differentiate accents or determine intelligibility were of no help, so this study was designed to let listeners group speakers by whatever they find important in hopes of discovering acoustic similarities within the groups.
Presentations
- Freeman, V. (2019, November). Speech intelligibility, deaf speech quality and personality ratings. American Speech-Language-Hearing (ASHA), Orlando, FL.
Related Work
- Part of the Impressions of Cochlear Implant User Speech project
- Next step: CI Voice Assessments
Student Corner
Students
- Christie Harris
Data and Materials
- See the main project page (Impressions of CI User Speech) for details about audio clips, speaker intelligibility scores, etc.
- Responses (PowerPoint slides with speakers grouped and labeled) from ~50 speech pathology undergrads and 33 adults without hearing loss experience
- PowerPoint slide with audio clips from 24 CI and 12 TH young adults each reading two different sentences; macros for exporting the groupings; R scripts for analyzing the groupings
- Outputs of ProsodyPro Praat script for voice reports; R analysis scripts, etc.
- Speaker and participant demographics, hearing/device history, experience with hearing loss
- Instructions, flyers, consent, IRB forms, etc.
Project Ideas
- Continue identifying and measuring acoustic properties to find similarities within groups