Effects of Prosodic Cues on Perception of Personalities and Facts by Non-Native Speakers

When we listen to others talk, we gather information being delivered in speech, and consciously or unconsciously that of speakers’ voices. A variety of prosodic correlates have been found relevant in perceiving personality (or voice attractiveness) and listeners susceptible to variations of phonetic cues, such as speaking rate, pitch, pitch range, intensity and sound- silence ratio. Such correlation between voice features and personality has been revealed in research involving native speech perception, though perceptual judgements on personality parameters were reported varying on cases.
This study focused on non-native listening and perception of personality, aiming at examining roles of prosodic cues in affecting judgements on voices. Chinese speakers who were advanced English learners were recruited to listen to short extracts from the speaker’s public talk, and then to rate on the speaker’s personality traits based on the voice. Speech extracts were modified to include variations in temporal and spectral cues. Results show that modification to speech rates seemed in general beneficial to improve listeners’ comprehension accuracy than that to pitch. The modification also resulted in varied scores in the judgement of personality traits. Our findings suggest prosody’s universal as well as culture-dependent effects on perception of voices and personalities.