Intelligibility, recall, and voice evaluation across accents

Abstract

Speech elicits variable responses from listeners. Voices can vary in their intelligibility, how well listeners can recall messages produced by the voice, and what kind of social evaluation it explicitly or implicitly evokes. These different responses may be due to individual-specific attributes within a voice or the accent it carries. For example, familiar or more standard language varieties may be more intelligible producing more easily recalled, and eliciting more positive social evaluations from listeners. The current study uses 35 English-speaking voices from 7 different language backgrounds that vary in familiarity and prestige to the listener (n = 430) population, which is a representative heterogeneous sampling from the local university community. Specific voices were chosen from a larger data set based on their acoustic similarity. Listeners either completed a speech transcription task (quantifying intelligibility) or a cloze task (quantifying recall) and all listeners provided an evaluation of the voices’ likability and perceived comprehensibility. Bayesian data analysis is used to quantify and characterize the relationship between a voice’s intelligibility and how well it is recalled, and whether this relationship is predicted by social evaluation and listener experience. These results have implications for theories of speech recognition and how listeners process accents.