Judgments of speaker traits (Groyecka-Bernard et al., 2022)

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.

Attractiveness – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S1. Estimated marginal means of attractiveness ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S2. Post hoc comparisons of attractiveness ratings between stimuli in female vocalizers.

Attractiveness – male vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S3. Estimated marginal means of attractiveness ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S4. Post hoc comparisons of attractiveness ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Attractiveness – male vocalizers – conditions separately:

Supplemental Material S5. Estimated fixed and random effects of the models with perceived attractiveness as an outcome variable in males – separate for online and lab raters.

Supplemental Material S6. Estimated marginal means of attractiveness ratings across male vocalizers in online condition.

Supplemental Material S7. Post hoc comparisons of attractiveness ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers in online condition.

Attractiveness – male vocalizers – lab:

Supplemental Material S8. Estimated marginal means of attractiveness ratings across male vocalizers in lab condition.

Supplemental Material S9. Post hoc comparisons of attractiveness ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers in online condition.

Dominance – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S10. Estimated marginal means of dominance ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S11. Post hoc comparisons of dominance ratings between stimuli in female vocalizers.

Dominance – male vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S12. Estimated marginal means of dominance ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S13. Post hoc comparisons of dominance ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Likability – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S14. Estimated marginal means of likability ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S15. Post hoc comparisons of likability ratings between stimuli in female vocalizers.

Likability – male vocalizers: 

Supplemental Material S16. Estimated marginal means of likability ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S17. Post hoc comparisons of likability ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Trustworthiness – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S18. Estimated marginal means of trustworthiness ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S19. Post hoc comparisons of trustworthiness ratings between stimuli in female vocalizers.

Trust – male vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S20. Estimated marginal means of trustworthiness ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S21. Post hoc comparisons of trustworthiness ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Femininity–masculinity – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S22. Estimated marginal means of femininity-masculinity ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S23. Post hoc comparisons of femininity-masculinity ratings between stimuli in female vocalizers.

Femininity–masculinity – male vocalizers: 

Supplemental Material S24. Estimated marginal means of femininity-masculinity ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S25. Post hoc comparisons of femininity-masculinity ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Health – female vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S26. Estimated marginal means of health ratings across female vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S27. Post hoc comparisons of health ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Health – male vocalizers:

Supplemental Material S28. Estimated marginal means of health ratings across male vocalizers.

Supplemental Material S29. Post hoc comparisons of health ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers.

Health – male vocalizers – conditions separately:

Supplemental Material S30. Estimated fixed and random effects of the models with perceived health as an outcome variable in males – separate for online and lab raters.

Supplemental Material S31. Estimated marginal means of health ratings across male vocalizers in online condition.

Supplemental Material S32. Post hoc comparisons of health ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers in online condition.

Male vocalizers health lab:

Supplemental Material S33. Estimated marginal means of health ratings across male vocalizers in lab condition.

Supplemental Material S34. Post hoc comparisons of health ratings between stimuli in male vocalizers in online condition.

Supplemental Material S35. Pairs of strongest and weakest correlations among different stimulus types across all traits separately for male and female vocalizers. 

Groyecka-Bernard, A., Pisanski, K., Frąckowiak, T., Kobylarek, A., Kupczyk, P., Oleszkiewicz, A., Sabiniewicz, A., Wróbel, M., & Sorokowski, P. (2022). Do voice-based judgments of socially relevant speaker traits differ across speech types? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_JSLHR-21-00690