Absolute judgments of speech rate as a function of vocal frequency and intensity

Abstract

Previous studies have found that vocal frequency and intensity both influence the perception of speech rate when a standard, or “anchoring,” stimulus preceded each experimental stimulus. The two studies reported here replicated the previous studies but omitted the anchoring stimulus. In one study, 30 judges rated nine “content‐masked” speech stimuli generated from a 20‐second female speech sample by factorially combining three levels each of manipulated frequency and intensity. In the other study, 29 judges rated 18 content‐standard stimuli generated from two 20‐s speech samples, one from a woman and one from a man. The actual rate of each stimulus was 150 wpm. With the masked stimuli, frequency and intensity separately influenced the perception of speech rate. With content‐standard stimuli, frequency and intensity jointly affected speech‐rate perception. Moreover, the joint influence was affected by the gender of the speaker; stimuli from the male speaker were judged to be faster. The studies suggest that an anchoring stimulus is not needed to demonstrate the influence of frequency and intensity on speech‐rate perception.