To verify whether there are differences in the judgments of listeners’ attitudes as a function of the presence, severity, and type of vocal deviation, and to identify the predictive factors of ...listeners’ attitudes toward dysphonic voices in Brazilian Portuguese speakers.
A sample of CAPE-V sentences was used from 44 subjects of both genders. The samples presented different severities of vocal deviation (general grade - GG) (healthy, mild, moderate, and severe) and different degrees of roughness (GR), breathiness (GB), and strain (GS), characterized by a perceptual-auditory judgment performed by speech therapists. The samples were presented to 152 listeners of both genders who performed the judgment of 12 attitudes inserted in a semantic differential scale previously validated for this study. Here, we used a Logistic Regression Model.
There was no association between listener's gender and the judgment of attitudes. Subjects with vocal quality deviation were judged more negatively in relation to vocally healthy individuals. We observed that higher the GG, higher the negative judgment of listeners in relation to the speakers. Listeners judged breathy and strained voices as more negative. In the general model for female and male voices, the increase in GB and GG reduced the chance of a voice being evaluated positively by 16 and 20%, respectively. For female voices, GB and GS reduced the chance of a female voice being evaluated positively by 36 and 19%, respectively. GG reduces the chance of a male voice being evaluated positively by 46%, while GR increases the chance of a male voice being judged positively by 62 %.
There is an association between the presence, severity, and type of vocal deviation and listeners’ attitudes. We identified a predictive model of listeners' attitudes related to dysphonic voices among Brazilian Portuguese speakers. In general, GG and GB were predictors of negative attitudes toward listeners. GB and GS were predictors of negative attitudes toward female voices. The GG is a predictor of negative attitudes toward male voices, while the GR increases the chance of positive judgments.
The terms “soprano” and “mezzo-soprano” are frequently used by vocal pedagogues to describe a main category of singing timbre categorization, while the terms “lyric” and “dramatic” are often used to ...describe sub-categories of “soprano” and “mezzo-soprano”. A handful of studies have reported on the perceptual dissimilarity of main voice categories, but few, if any, have focused on within voice category perceptual distinctions such as dramatic and lyric vocal timbre. Using stimuli collected from cisgender female singers of varying voice categories and voice weights across the pitches C4, G4, and F5, this study sought (1) to visualize an experienced listener's perception of vocal timbre dissimilarity within and between voice categories using the statistical technique of multidimensional scaling (MDS), (2) to identify salient acoustic predictors of voice category and voice weight, and (3) to determine any dependencies on pitch for the perception of vocal timbre.
For the pitches C4, G4, and F5, experienced listeners (N=18) rated the dissimilarity of pairs of sung vowels produced by classically trained singers classified as follows: six mezzo-sopranos (three lighter and three heavier) and six sopranos (three lighter and three heavier). The resulting dissimilarity data were analyzed using MDS. Backward linear regression was used to see if one or more of the following variables predicted MDS dimensions: spectral centroid from 0 to 5 kHz, spectral centroid from 0 to 2 kHz, spectral centroid from 2 to 5 kHz, frequency vibrato rate, and frequency vibrato extent. Listeners also completed a categorization task where they rated each individual stimulus on two dimensions: voice category and voice weight.
Visual analysis of the MDS solutions appears to show that both voice category and voice weight emerged as dimensions at pitches C4 and G4. Discriminant analysis, on the other hand, statistically confirmed both these dimensions at G4, but only voice weight at C4. At pitch F5, only voice weight emerged as a dimension, both visually and statistically. Acoustic predictors of MDS dimensions were highly variable across pitches. At the pitch C4, no MDS dimension was predicted by the acoustic variables. At pitch G4, the dimension associated with voice weight was predicted by spectral centroid from 0 to 2 kHz. At pitch F5, the dimension associated with voice weight was predicted by spectral centroid from 2 to 5 kHz and frequency vibrato rate. In the categorization task, voice category and voice weight were highly correlated at the pitches C4, G4, and when all pitches were presented together, but weakly correlated at the pitch F5.
While voice category and sub-category distinctions are commonly used by singing voice professionals to describe the overall timbre of voices, these distinctions may not be able to consistently predict the perceptual difference between any given pair of vocal stimuli, particularly across pitch. Nonetheless, these dimensions do emerge in some fashion when listeners are presented with paired vocal stimuli. On the other hand, when asked to rate stimuli according to the specific labels of mezzo-soprano/soprano and dramatic/lyric, experienced listeners have a very difficult time disentangling voice category from voice weight when presented with a single-note stimulus or even a 3-note stimulus consisting of the pitches C3, G4, and F5.
People readily imagine narratives in response to instrumental music. Although previous work has established that these narratives show broad intersubjectivity, it remains unclear whether these ...imagined stories are atemporal, or unfold systematically over the temporal extent of a musical excerpt. To investigate the dynamics of perceived musical narrative, we had participants first listen to 16 instrumental musical excerpts, which had previously been normed for factors of interest. While listening, participants continuously moved a slider to indicate their fluctuating perceptions of tension and relaxation. In a separate experimental session, participants reported the stories they imagined while listening to each excerpt, and then, while listening to the excerpts a final time, clicked a mouse to mark the time points at which they imagined new events in the ongoing imagined story. The time points of these event markings were not uniformly distributed throughout the excerpts, but were clustered at distinct moments, indicating that imagined narratives unfold in real time and entail general consensus about when listeners imagine events in the music. Moreover, the time points at which people tended to imagine events were correlated with the time points at which people tended to perceive salient changes in musical tension, as separately recorded within the first experimental session. The degree of alignment was greater for excerpts high in narrativity than those low in narrativity. Together, these results show that music can dynamically guide a listener's imagination and there is remarkable intersubjectivity in ‘when’ hear imagined story events in a piece of music.
What perceptions do group participants have about silent observers, what transferences are involved, what function can the listeners have for the group? In an anonymous survey and evaluation based on ...content analysis, almost all participants reported positive, and two thirds also negative impressions and perceptions. Observers were perceived as being familiar or supportive and as threatening or constraining to an approximately equal extent. There was no outright demonization or perception of a divide between the group leader(s) and the observers, as described in the older literature. Group participants also appear to perceive observers as representatives of their own superego, which are ‘silenced’.
Extraverts are often characterized as highly social individuals who are highly invested in their interpersonal interactions. We propose that extraverts’ interaction partners hold a different ...view—that extraverts are highly social, but not highly invested. Across six studies (five preregistered; N = 2,456), we find that interaction partners consistently judge more extraverted individuals to be worse listeners than less extraverted individuals. Furthermore, interaction partners assume that extraversion is positively associated with a greater ability to modify one’s self-presentation. This behavioral malleability (i.e., the “acting” component of self-monitoring) may account for the unfavorable lay belief that extraverts are not listening.
This study investigates the impact of wearing a fabric face mask on speech comprehension, an underexplored topic that can inform theories of speech production. Speakers produced sentences in three ...speech styles (casual, clear, positive-emotional) while in both face-masked and non-face-masked conditions. Listeners were most accurate at word identification in multi-talker babble for sentences produced in clear speech, and less accurate for casual speech (with emotional speech accuracy numerically in between). In the clear speaking style, face-masked speech was actually more intelligible than non-face-masked speech, suggesting that speakers make clarity adjustments specifically for face masks. In contrast, in the emotional condition, face-masked speech was less intelligible than non-face-masked speech, and in the casual condition, no difference was observed, suggesting that ‘emotional’ and ‘casual’ speech are not styles produced with the explicit intent to be intelligible to listeners. These findings are discussed in terms of automatic and targeted speech adaptation accounts.
Most research on L2 reading comprehension has indicated that 98 per cent lexical coverage provides adequate comprehension of written text. This figure has been transferred to listening comprehension ...and has been used to set vocabulary size targets for L2 learners. This study directly investigates coverage in regard to listening comprehension, to determine whether such transfer is reasonable. The coverage of four spoken informal narrative passages was manipulated, and participants' (36 native and 40 non-native speakers) listening comprehension of factual information was measured. Results showed that most native and non-native participants could adequately comprehend the spoken texts with only 90 per cent coverage, although the non-natives showed considerable variation at this level. At 95 per cent coverage, non-native participants also demonstrated relatively good comprehension, but with much less variation. Based on a 95 per cent coverage figure, language users would need to know between 2,000 and 3,000 word families for adequate listening comprehension, compared with Nation's (2006) calculation of 6,000-7,000 families based on a 98 per cent figure. Adapted from the source document
•During conversation, interlocutors rarely overlap or leave long gaps between turns.•We investigated how listeners use prediction to achieve such coordination.•Listeners used content predictions to ...prepare their verbal responses early.•However, they did not use these predictions to determine the speaker’s turn-end.•We suggest that content predictions aid early response preparation.
During conversation, there is often little gap between interlocutors’ utterances. In two pairs of experiments, we manipulated the content predictability of yes/no questions to investigate whether listeners achieve such coordination by (i) preparing a response as early as possible or (ii) predicting the end of the speaker’s turn. To assess these two mechanisms, we varied the participants’ task: They either pressed a button when they thought the question was about to end (Experiments 1a and 2a), or verbally answered the questions with either yes or no (Experiments 1b and 2b). Predictability effects were present when participants had to prepare a verbal response, but not when they had to predict the turn-end. These findings suggest content prediction facilitates turn-taking because it allows listeners to prepare their own response early, rather than because it helps them predict when the speaker will reach the end of their turn.
Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region ...of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions as a semantic dimension of music. Participants listened to wordless musical excerpts and determined which of two presented stories was the correct match. Correct matches were stories previously imagined by individuals from the US or China in response to each of the excerpts, while foils were correct matches to one of the other tested excerpts. Results revealed that listeners from Arkansas and Michigan had no difficulty matching the music with stories generated by Arkansas listeners. Wordless music, then, far from an abstract stimulus, seems to engender shared, concrete narrative perceptions in listeners. These perceptions are stable and robust for within-culture participants, even at geographically distinct locales (e.g. Arkansas and Michigan). This finding refutes the notion that music is an asemantic medium. In contrast, participants in both the US and China had more difficulty determining correct story-music matches for stories generated by participants from another culture, suggesting that a sufficiently shared pool of experiences must exist for strong intersubjectivity to arise.
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